Chinese parents leaving country to get vaccines for their children

BEIJING — Apple Zhou doesn’t trust Chinese vaccines.

She took her 2-year-old son to Hong Kong to get his tetanus shot, a trip that cost $3,000 — and she will do it again the next time he needs any preventive treatment.

But after a pair of China’s biggest vaccine makers acknowledged this month selling mislabeled and faulty medications, Zhou’s just to-be-safe attitude chilled into fear.

“I was thinking about having a second child,” she said, “and now I’m beginning to hesitate.”

In a country that manufactures 95 percent of its vaccines, parents are increasingly opting to look elsewhere, including Hong Kong, to get medicines imported from Europe and elsewhere. Poorer families, meanwhile, are left wondering if they can trust the shots at local clinics.

On Tuesday, China’s drug watchdog announced that the state-owned Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, had peddled ineffective vaccines. The firm started recalling about 400,000 doses in May and must now pay an unspecified fine, the China Food and Drug Administration said.

Hundreds of thousands of children are thought to have been injected with the useless medicine, officials said. They thus far appear unharmed, except for a prolonged vulnerability to otherwise preventable diseases.

Chinese officials ordered the arrest of 18 people at Changchun Changsheng and vowed that anyone involved in deceitful or negligent enterprises would be banned from the pharmaceutical industry for life.