In China, Government Data on Drugs Blocked From Public After Backlash
When a group of prominent Chinese doctors publicly raised worries last week about the quality of domestic drugs, China’s government sent officials to investigate.
But now data about the drugs that appeared on a government website as recently as Friday is no longer publicly available. A social media post from a doctor who scrutinized the data has been taken down.
The criticism in China over how the government buys drugs for its public health care system, which most people use, has ignited frustration over the most basic of concerns: the effectiveness of medicine.
Two separate groups of medical experts and political advisers in Shanghai and Beijing are sounding the alarm over the country’s centralized drug procurement system and the drugs on a list of medications for public hospitals.
The drugs at issue are almost entirely generic versions of drugs that had been largely imported in the past. Among the products doctors are questioning include anesthesia they said often fails to put patients to sleep and stroke medication that has failed to prevent strokes. Even some of the most basic drugs, like laxatives, seem to be ineffective, the doctors have said.
The scrutiny is focusing attention on a campaign by Beijing to reduce costs in its national public health care system, which is coming under increasing financial pressures as the population ages.