Vaccine Scandal in China

Kids are required by the law to get vaccinations in China. Last week, it came out that a major drug producer distributed hundreds of thousands of faulty vaccines for things like rabies as well as diphtheria, whooping cough, and tetanus. Now people are looking to the government for answers.

The number of vaccines being provided that have been found faulty since the investigation began tally to over a hundred thousand, inciting widespread upset and backlash. President Xi Jinping has responded to the incident calling it "vile and shocking."

Meanwhile, China's Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) has launched an investigation into the maker of the vaccine, Changchun Changsheng Biotechnology. The companies license for the human rabies vaccine has been revoked and a recall of all unused vaccines produced by the company has already gone into effect.

Five of the companies senior executives have been taken into custody by Changsheng authorities, who have officially announced they have begun a criminal investigation into the company.

Since the news broke Sunday, thousands of comments have flooded online message boards expressing disgust and concern. Parents and consumers have started using the hashtag "#Changsheng bio-tech vaccine incident," to post their reactions on Weibo, which is a Chinese platform similar to Twitter.

"Our trust has been overdrawn again and again, it's so irresponsible for everyone's life," one user wrote in a heart wrenching post.

Many of the defective vaccines had already reached the market and been administered to Chinese children as part of the mandatory national vaccination program. There is no information at this stage of the investigation as to how the children already vaccinated with the Changsheng product could be affected.

At least two different vaccines -- rabies na diphtehria and tetanus (DPT) -- manufactured by the company are known to be defective. State-run news outlets have reported that at least 113,000 doses of the rabies vaccine, and 253,338 doses of the DPT vaccine were faulty.

This news is all too familiar for the parents in China, who dealt with a similar incident in November 2017 when another 400,000 doses of the same vaccine, produce by a different company, the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, were found to be "substandard"

The vaccine scandal is just the latest in a series of controversies surrounding fake or defective products being produced and distributed in China, leaving the people to demand transparency and answers.