Chinese Premier Li Keqiang promises to clean up vaccine industry, just as he did in 2016

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has ordered an immediate investigation into the DPT vaccine scandal as Beijing scrambles to contain the country’s latest public health crisis that has left parents angry and scared.

The incident, he said in statement issued just before midnight on Saturday, had crossed a “moral bottom line”.

He ordered an investigation into the “complete production and sale processes” of the vaccines and threatened “resolute punishment” for the companies and people involved.

Meanwhile, officials in the east Chinese province of Shandong said that there had been no reports of any children sickened by the inferior vaccines.

In a report on Monday, newspaper Dazhong Daily quoted the Shandong Centre for Disease Control and Prevention as saying that while the DPT vaccines, which are used to inoculate children against diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough) and tetanus, are ineffective they are not thought to be harmful.

It said also it had records for all 215,184 children who were given the shots.

It is not the first time the Chinese leader has vowed to clean up the vaccine industry. Li made much the same pledge more than two years ago in response to a similar scandal.

In the latest scandal it is thought that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Chinese children – some as young as three months old – might have been injected with ineffective vaccines, made by the country’s largest producers, under a compulsory government health care system.

Fury and fear filled China’s social media over the weekend as parents questioned how such a scandal could have been allowed to happen.

On WeChat, the country’s most popular messaging service, the Chinese word for vaccine appeared in 321 million articles and searches, 80 times the number of times it appeared on Friday.

The latest company to become embroiled in the scandal is Changsheng Bio-technology, which is based in Changchun, capital of northeast China’s Jilin province.

The provincial food and drug administration said on its website on Friday that the company sold about 252,600 substandard DPT vaccines to the Shandong Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency in charge of public health in a province of about 100 million people.

For that offence Changsheng Bio-technology was fined 3.4 million yuan, but it was also revealed that the company had been guilty of another serious violation over the manufacture of rabies vaccines.

The State Drug Administration said on July 15 that during an unannounced inspection of the listed company, officials discovered forged data relating to about 113,000 rabies vaccines. Such was the severity of the offence that the watchdog revoked the company’s licence to produce the drug and said it might launch a criminal investigation.