China's stifling laws depriving its people of common vaccines

Beijing

STIFLING regulations are preventing China's 1.4 billion people from accessing several common vaccines available in much of the rest of the world, raising public health risks and posing a challenge to global pharmaceutical companies in a huge potential market.

Sam Ding, a tech professional in southern China, says he crossed the border to Hong Kong twice to get his one-year-old daughter a key vaccine for potentially fatal conditions - pneumonia, blood infections and meningitis. Why Hong Kong? The pneumococcal vaccine from Pfizer Inc that he was looking for wasn't available on the mainland.

At the heart of Mr Ding's troubles is a massive pharmaceutical market where demand is outstripping the ability of regulators to keep up, forcing patients to scramble for many essential vaccines and hindering the ability of multinationals to bring them in. The Chinese vaccine market is estimated to grow at around 17 per cent a year to hit 40 billion yuan (S$8.4 billion) in 2018 from about 25 billion yuan last year, McKinsey & Co estimates based on research reports. But more than 30 vaccine products identified by top multinationals as major reven…