We were pleased to discover today that RUC News Workshop (RUC新闻坊), the official WeChat account of Renmin University of China’s School of Journalism and Communication, has posted a helpful timeline and summary of the development of the ongoing vaccine scandal in China. We share a translation of the timeline below.
This is obviously a story with potentially huge implications for China’s leadership. Under Xi Jinping, the Party has managed quite effectively to keep scandal out of the headlines, something evident before Xi’s hardline February 2016 speech on media policy. This story, with its clear indication of deeper institutional problems, will surely be aggressively curtailed by censors in coming days. But its development is in many ways eerily familiar — not unlike the bursts of coverage, and often decent reporting, that we grew accustomed to seeing in the heyday of the commercial press in China, up through the Hu Jintao era.
RUC News Workshop notes that the incident, which is being referred to in Chinese as the “Changsheng Bio-Tech Problem Vaccine Incident” (长生生物问题疫苗事件), first unfolded on July 15, but was slow to gain public attention — finally culminating yesterday with an official response from Premier Li Keqiang. RUC News Workshop divides the scandal so far into three phases.
Our translation of the RUC News Workshop timeline follows, with some edits and cuts for clarity — and a few notes and links here and there.
TIMELINE
July 15, 2018
A notice issued by the China Food and Drug Administration says that fabricated productions records had been discovered for rabies vaccines produced by Changchun Changsheng Life Sciences Limited (长春长生生物科技有限责任公司), known for short as Changchun Changsheng (长春长生). According to the notice, the company had been ordered to stop production, and its Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) certification (生产质量管理规范证书) had been revoked. According to a news report by the Shanghai-based outlet Jiemian, the investigation had been prompted by an older staff member working inside a production facility who had come forward.
July 16, 2018
Changchun Changsheng’s share price sinks and several large shareholders dump their holdings.
July 17, 2018
Changchun Changsheng issues a public response to the situation, assuring customers there are no problems. Changchun Changsheng’s parent company, “Changsheng Bio-Technology Company” (长生生物科技股份有限公司), known for short as Changchun Bio-Tech (长生生物), issues a statement saying that all rabies vaccines that have entered the market comply with quality regulations and there is no cause for concern.
July 19, 2018
The incident is further fueled as Changchun Bio-Tech issues a statement saying that its subsidiary, Changchun Changcheng, had previously received a penalty notice (处罚书) from health authorities in Jilin province notifying them that a batch of their DPT vaccines did not comply with safety regulations. The notice [which dated the start of the investigation to October 2017] said that the company’s DPT vaccines had been deemed “inferior medicines” not meeting standards. The company had been fined 3.44 million yuan, and some of its vaccine stocks were seized.
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