Censors come into action as China's latest vaccination scandal ignites

Beijing (AFP) – Chinese censors on Sunday suppressed articles and articles on the vaccine industry, which sparked an online outcry against the country's latest vaccine scandal.

Regulators announced last week that they had stopped the production of an anti-rabies vaccine.

It was just the latest in a series of health and safety scandals that fueled the fear of food safety and basic medicine and anger of sleepy regulators.

Chinese censors and regulators struggled to keep abad of the public's response, suppressing messages on WeChat as the state media tried to take control of the story. he ordered that all production be stopped at the vaccine manufacturer and launched an investigation.

Changchun Changsheng Biotechnology is the second largest vaccine manufacturer in China. the rabies vaccine and a subsidiary of a major publicly traded vaccine manufacturer.

Anxiety increased over the weekend in the form of an essay alleging that corruption and dark practices in the vaccine industry were spreading in WeChat. Internet users have republished the self-edited essay as censors to delete the content.

The CFDA said last week that the problematic rabies vaccine had not left the Changsheng factory

. the production already stopped of another vaccine – against diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough – that the regulators considered mediocre last year and which also attracted public attention [19659009]. In Beijing, an anonymous official of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention told the local paper The Paper that parents in the Chinese capital did not have to worry: "Beijing has no reason to worry. neither of these two vaccines in question, the public can be comfortable.

Guangdong and Sichuan regulators, quoted by the state-owned broadcaster CCTV, told residents that problematic Changsheng vaccines were not available.

But CCTV acknowledged that 250,000 doses of the problematic vaccine had been sold to eastern Shandong Province.

The Communist Party said Sunday that local regulators must "act quickly, make an end to the investigation and announce the authoritative information in a timely manner to appease public anxiety."

CCTV listed questions that the public needed to answer and noted that the local authority overseeing Changsheng had hung up on calls from reporters or refused to answer the phone.] A similar scandal erupted in Shandong in 2016, involving storage, Inadequate transport and sale of vaccines worth tens of millions of dollars – many of which have expired.

For parents, there are also parallels with China's most notorious incident in recent years. 000 children became ill, including six dying, in a 2008 case involving powdered milk contaminated with melamine.