A child receives a vaccination at a clinic in Liuzhou, in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, on April 26, 2013. Photo: CFP

Were it not for a bad reaction to a vaccine, Wang believes his 4-year-old daughter in Huai'an, Jiangsu Province, would have had a healthy and prosperous life.

Instead, she is sickly, overweight and shows symptoms of arthritis.

"My daughter is among the victims of vaccine side effects. She has had to take steroids every day since she was diagnosed with a condition caused by a hepatitis A vaccine," Wang's father told the Global Times on June 26, saying that he is convinced these are side effects of the steroids.

On October 29, 2010, Wang discovered that his daughter could not lift her head, just a few hours after she was vaccinated at a local clinic. He took her to the Nanjing Children's Hospital, which diagnosed her condition as the neuromuscular disease myasthenia gravis.

The timing of the incident convinced Wang that the vaccine was the cause of his daughter's problem. "I was confused at that moment. How could the medicine which is supposed to help her become healthy be the cause of my daughter's disease?"

Despite Wang's questions, doctors have neither confirmed nor denied whether the vaccination might have caused his daughter's condition.

Wang's case is far from unique - each year, hundreds of negative reactions to vaccines are reported around China, which is now the biggest vaccine consumer worldwide, with a billion vaccinations annually, according to an April report by the Chinese Center for Disease Control.

A report in the Nandu Daily said that the rate of negative reactions is allegedly around one to two for every 1 million vaccinations, with approximately 1,000 kids suffering from them across the country. 

"I suspect the actual number of these cases in China is higher than what was reported. In many remote rural areas, people might not even know their child's sickness was caused by vaccines," Wang told the Global Times.

No cure-all

"When my 2-month-old boy was diagnosed with polio in 1995 after a polio vaccination pill at a local hospital, the doctors and I were  shocked because polio had been eradicated in our city for decades, and he had just taken a vaccine to fight against that very disease," Zhou Hanbing, who comes from Ma'anshan, Anhui Province, told the Global Times. Zhou is a member of a support group for the families of people who have suffered negative effects of vaccines.

The pill that Zhou's son took was a kind of live "attenuated" vaccine. These vaccines are made of weakened virus, which, in theory, shouldn't be strong enough to activate the disease but are strong enough to generate an immune system response.

When they work, they provide lifetime protection, though in the one-in-a-million case when they don't they can savage the body and lead to incurable diseases or death. They are considered more risky than "inactivated" vaccines where the virus has been killed.

"The US has stopped using live attenuated vaccines and just uses inactivated vaccines to lower the rate of negative reactions, but China still insists on using some of the live attenuated ones," Zhang Yu, the chief of the immunology department of the Peking University Health Science Center, told the Global Times Monday.

Monopolies or competition?

There are five kinds of free vaccines in China - BCG(a tuberculosis vaccine), Hepatitis B, DPT (a combination vaccine for tetanus, whooping cough and diphtheria), the measles, and polio. "Among these, the BCG and polio vaccines are live attenuated vaccines, but the polio pills cause the most accidents," Zhang said.

Some experts have suggested that cost is among the reasons why China still uses live attenuated vaccines.

"Technically, China would have no problem replacing the free live attenuated vaccines with the inactivated alternative. But the cost of the inactivated version is 10 times higher than the live attenuated one," Wang Yuedan, a vice chief of the immunology department of the Peking University Health Science Center, told the Nandu Daily.

"The free vaccines are only produced by a few State-owned companies, representing a monopoly. If the plants decided to produce inactivated vaccines, they would have to improve their production lines. The live-attenuated vaccines make a profit, why would they be motivated to do that?" Chen Tao'an, a former official from the Shanxi Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Nandu Daily.

Whilst the free vaccines face bottlenecks and monopolies, commercial vaccines face very different problems.

"There are too many plants producing commercial vaccines. And that makes it hard for the government in terms of quality regulation," Zhang told the Global Times.

Ultimately, most Chinese parents must have their children vaccinated.

"Kids are not allowed to go to kindergarten if they haven't had vaccinations," a Shandong mother surnamed Li who declined to be named told the Global Times Monday.

Zhao Kai, an official at the Beijing-based National Vaccine & Serum Institute, which is in charge of producing free vaccines, refused to comment on this issue to the Global Times Monday.

Abandoned families

Liability remains an issue.

After Wang's daughter's condition was diagnosed, doctors were cagey about the precise cause, refusing to confirm or deny it was the vaccine.

"These kinds of answers can be regarded as a positive answer, even though they are still vague," Zhou pointed out, adding that many parents were told it was a coincidence.

In Zhou's case, the hospital hadn't ruled it out so compensation was still on the table. Wang finally received 4,500 yuan ($733.8) to aid in medical costs, but was told it was an allowance and was not compensation, because there were no regulations suggesting the hospital should pay in these cases.

According to Article 46 of the national vaccine distribution and vaccination regulations released on June 1, 2005, victims of vaccines should be given a one-time allowance payout, the amount being defined by local regulations.

"Relevant regulations are missing in some provinces, leaving those families helpless," Zhang told the Global Times, suggesting that China should establish a fund to assist these families.