Inoculation incident moral: No room for compromise
Yan XizaoChina Daily  Updated: 2005-07-02 06:58

As we get closer to the truth behind the vaccine accident in Sixian County, Anhui Province, the messier things get.

Finding the facts appears trickier than we could have imagined.

Hundreds of students in a Sixian township have shown unusual symptoms after taking a hepatitis A vaccine the local epidemic prevention agency purchased from a private wholesaler.

An affirmative conclusion about the nature and cause of the incident is still pending. There simply were too many variables with potential to cause trouble.

We hope the laboratory tests now under way might finally corroborate the judgment of experts that this is purely a rare case of collective hysteria.

However, such an outcome might prove disturbing, because it could discount people's sense of urgency to clear up the mess.

All legal requirements about authorization and procedures, as stipulated in the new Regulation on Vaccine Circulation And Inoculation, must be satisfied.

Even if violations are not found to be the direct cause of the incident, they could well become the cause of some other incident on another day.

There is no room for compromise.

Duely followed procedures and authorizations are a matter of life or death in this regard.

Beyond that, as the entire picture unfolds, we see it as an imperative to re-evaluate the state of epidemic prevention and control network.

A Beijing News investigation found no clues indicating that a hepatitis A outbreak exists in the region. And some of the students involved had taken a hepatitis vaccine in the recent past and already enjoyed immunity from the disease.

In that case, a collective approach to inoculation was unnecessary.

An official with the local epidemic prevention station confessed to the newspaper the station had not submitted an application for the inoculation because it knew it would not be approved.

But they provided the shots, anyway, because it was a paid service. They bought the vaccine at 4.5 yuan (55 US cents) per shot from a wholesaler, and charged students 25 yuan (US$3) for each injection.

Twenty-five yuan is not a small amount in a place where the farmers' average annual income is a mere 2,000 yuan (US$240).

Imposing such an unnecessary financial burden on poor rural households is immoral. The way it was done was illegal.

But it was not done without a reason.

Epidemic prevention workers wanted money to support themselves. Only four of the six members of the station are covered by the local financial budget. They receive just 150 yuan (US$18) a month.

This is reminiscent of the well-known problems in our discourse of farmers' financial burdens.

It offers fresh proof for the popular understanding that overstaffed township administrations constitute an unbearable financial burden on farmers.

The outrageous price of the shots - 25 yuan for a 4.5 yuan wholesale cost says it all.

Still, we need well-grounded evidence to attribute this malpractice at the township epidemic control station to redundancy.

The SARS outbreak two years ago taught us epidemic control was an essential though dangerously weak link in our public health system.

It still is.

The embarrassment of the township epidemic prevention station in Sixian County shows either there are too many people on its payroll, or they are underfinanced.

And the way they handled the vaccine inoculations showed they lacked professional training, either in expertise, or in morality.

We need to decide upon reasonable and affordable personnel levels for the epidemic prevention network, so that people can be properly trained and paid to do their jobs.

State and local governments share an obligation to provide adequate financial support for epidemic prevention, considering its impacts on people's livelihoods.

It is a shame when those who are supposed to serve the public welfare become a threat to it.

(China Daily 07/02/2005 page4)

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