NY.- When demand for antipyretic drugs more than quadrupled the price of ibuprofen, an eastern Chinese city began rationing sales, selling the pills separately.
When a popular Chinese online pharmacy put the antiviral Paxlovid up for sale, it sold out in a matter of hours.
And when word spread in Hong Kong and Taiwan of China’s drug shortages, friends and family scrambled to buy large quantities of drugs from local vendors to ship to mainland China.
As the Covid-19 virus sweeps through parts of China, millions of Chinese are struggling to find treatments, from the most basic home remedies for colds to more powerful antivirals for hospitalized patients. The supply shortages highlight just how swift (and lawless) China backtracked from abandoning its strict “no covid” policy about two weeks ago.
The change caught the country’s hospitals, clinics and pharmacies off guard. Pharmacies in many cities sold out of the most common medicines for fever and cold. Many health centers were not prepared for the deluge of patient demand, as they were given very little advance notice of the need to stock up on medications. The shortages are fueling anger and concern among the Chinese, who until recently had been warned by the government that an uncontrolled spread of Covid-19 would be devastating.
“The doctor told me there was no fever medicine,” said Diane Ye, 28, a Covid-19 patient in Beijing who lined up outside a hospital for hours when she had a fever only to be sent home with a bottle of medicine for a sore throat.
For almost three years, the country maintained some of the strictest pandemic controls in the world, ordering massive tests and locking down cities like Shanghai for months. Then, almost without warning, the government announced a broad suspension of the restrictions on December 7, apparently to bow to economic pressure and growing social discontent following widespread protests in late November.
Indications of outbreaks have appeared in many cities. China reported only seven deaths from Covid-19 through much of the third week of December, but reports of overcrowded crematoriums and funeral homes have raised questions about the accuracy of the government data. Lines have formed at hospitals and medicines have flown off drugstore shelves.
“The opening is great, but it happened too quickly and without preparation. People have no supply of these common medicines at home,” said a pharmacist who works at a public hospital in Beijing and gave only his last name, Zhang, given the political sensitivity of the matter.
Even before the policy change, fever medicines were already in short supply, Zhang said, because the government strictly controlled the sale of cold and flu medicines under the “zero covid” policy. It required buyers to register their names, a rule intended to prevent residents from using over-the-counter fever-reducing drugs to avoid detection by the country’s ubiquitous health monitoring system.
“If these restrictions had first been eased, for example, for two months, and lifted once people were ready, then this rush wouldn’t have happened,” Zhang said.
Now many Chinese face the bleak prospect of a massive Covid-19 outbreak that could rage all winter long and have been forced to improvise to cover what’s missing. Some turn to home remedies, such as canned peaches, in the belief that they can prevent the disease. A group of volunteers organized a campaign on social networks to reach out to the elderly in rural areas. The group received many cash donations, but few medicines due to shortages.
In recent days, some Chinese have ventured across the border into Macau to receive the one thing they are less likely to find than ibuprofen: a foreign-made mRNA vaccine. China has not approved these types of vaccines despite their availability, in an apparent effort to protect the domestic industry. (Beijing earlier this month said China would allow the German vaccines, but only for German citizens in the country.)
A data analyst in southern Shenzhen, who asked to be identified only by her last name, Fan, traveled to the gambling destination last week to get an mRNA booster. She believed that mixing the booster with the two doses of the Chinese Sinovac vaccine that she was given in her country could help her immunity.
He said he began collecting cold medicine, saline nose spray and masks since mid-November, when cases began to rise in nearby Guangdong. This month, as regions across China experienced shortages, she mailed supplies to dozens of relatives in Shanghai, the city of Xi’an to the north, and Fujian province to the east.
Social media users have turned to black humor to manage the crisis, rephrasing the “covid zero” slogan that reminds the population that “Anyone who has to be transferred to quarantine will be transferred to quarantine”. The new version? “Anyone who can have covid will have covid.”
The government has tried to reassure the population, telling them that it is prioritizing actions to increase the country’s drug stocks.
State media said the shortage is temporary and highlighted a recent push by Chinese drugmakers, under the direction of the central government, to increase supplies. China is one of the world’s largest producers of pharmaceuticals, making about a third of the world’s supply of ibuprofen, a pain reliever and fever reducer.
Local governments have also committed to purchasing more drugs and distributing them to pharmacies. In the eastern city of Nanjing, the authorities announced that, starting December 18, they would put two million tablets a day of antipyretic medicine on the market. To make the supply go further, pharmacies were ordered to unseal the packages to sell the pills separately and limit purchases to six pills per person.
In the central city of Wuhan, the Hubei provincial government declared that it would supply three million ibuprofen tablets a week, mainly to medical centers, and in the northeastern city of Jinan, more than one million ibuprofen tablets were distributed to clinics. and pharmacies, state media reported.
China’s rush to tackle drug shortages reflects a flurry of last-minute deals to bring more foreign-made vaccines and treatments to market.
Authorities have approved four national vaccines in the past two weeks alone, and China’s state-owned pharmaceutical company Meheco Group announced last week that it had reached an agreement to import and distribute Pfizer’s Paxlovid, an oral treatment that greatly reduces the risk of hospitalization. and death. (In April, Pfizer had also signed another deal with another Chinese pharmaceutical company, Zhejiang Huahai, to produce Paxlovid for the Chinese market.)
The approval of Paxlovid contrasts with China’s treatment of foreign vaccines against Covid-19. The difference in this case is that China has several domestically produced alternatives for Covid-19 vaccines, but no antiviral substitute as effective as Paxlovid.
“Paxlovid fills a huge gap for China to treat Covid-19 patients with serious conditions,” said Xi Chen, a health economist at the Yale School of Public Health. “There is no clear competitor among China’s domestic antiviral drug producers.”
One symptom of the high demand for Paxlovid in China has been that on the first day the country allowed the antiviral treatment to be sold online, available boxes of the drug were hoarded by a Shanghai-based healthcare company called 111, Inc. Since then no online sales of the medicine have been reported, which remains in short supply.
The clamor for the drug has even spread outside of mainland China. In self-governing Taiwan, the government has urged people to moderate their purchases from China. In the Chinese city of Hong Kong, pharmacies are now placing limits on purchases, while others are helping to mail medicine across the border.
On Hong Kong Island, the Wonderful Dispensary charges customers about $15 for its staff to ship a pack of pills to mainland China. Tony Ng, a clerk who has worked at the store for more than 20 years, said the pharmacy recently ran out of a popular brand of acetaminophen.
“Customers told me they were buying it for their families and friends,” said Ng, 50. “People can’t buy fever medicine on the mainland now. They really need it.”
At Xiehe hospital in the city of Wuhan, an anesthetist who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity because he did not have permission to speak to international media, said his hospital was rationing antipyretics and pain relievers to patients so they wouldn’t get sick. They will run out of these medicines.
The shortage could have been avoided with proper planning if the government had taken a more gradual approach coming out of its “covid zero” phase, the doctor said.
“I never thought a 180-degree change in policy was possible. I thought it would take at least half a year to relax covid controls gradually,” she said. “We are totally unprepared.”
The increasing efforts that people must go to to get a medicine box are causing anger among those who blame the government for not ensuring a smooth transition,
“When I see the news asking people to help each other, I feel foolish,” said Simon Zhang, a 24-year-old Beijinger whose girlfriend is recovering from Covid. “They ask us not to hoard and suggest that we divide a box of ibuprofen into several parts to sell… Why do we Chinese always bail out ourselves?”
