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.
The centralized drug system, known as volume-based procurement, has saved the government tens of billions of dollars. But the cost cutting could now come at the expense of drug effectiveness, said Zheng Minhua, the director of surgery at Ruijin Hospital.
Mr. Zheng was one of more than 20 doctors who proposed that the government allow patients access to brand-name drugs even if they are not on the government list.
Another doctor and political adviser in Beijing submitted his own proposal last week calling for similar changes. On Chinese social media, doctors and patients shared their frustrations about domestic drugs and complained about how difficult it was to get the original versions.
Amid the outcry last week, some experts began to dig into public data showing how the generic drugs stacked up against their originals. One doctor and former editor at a popular online health platform, Xia Zhimin, noticed that the data provided by different drugmakers was so similar they had to be fraudulent.
The National Medical Products Administration, which approves generic drugs and published the data, acknowledged the similarities and said they were caused by “editing errors” related to specific years of publication. But that did little to assuage concerns and instead elicited criticism on Chinese social media that a simple apology was not enough.
Then the agency removed the data from its platform and China’s internet censors scrubbed Dr. Xia’s analysis of the data from his WeChat account.
Over the weekend, an article in the state-owned China News Weekly quoted experts calling on the agency to make more data available rather than less. It also raised questions on over whether the staff at the agency might have known the data was plagiarized by did not speak up.
“A good pharmaceutical quality control system requires adequate information disclosure and transparency,” the article said.
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