Chinese court upholds sentences of two women for illegal vaccine trade

A court in Shandong Province on Friday rejected the appeals of two women who were previously sentenced to 15 years and six years in prison for illegal vaccine trade.

The main convict of a massive vaccine scandal Pan Hongwei was arrested in 2015. [Photo: thepaper.com]

The Higher People's Court of Shandong Province upheld the ruling handed down by the Intermediate People's Court of Jinan City, the provincial capital, in January.

The courts found Pang Hongwei illegally purchased vaccines, including rabies vaccines, which she stored in warehouses in Jinan and Liaocheng, and then sold them to clients in the province and other parts of the country between June 2013 and April 2015.

Pang improperly stored the vaccines she bought, and she earned nearly 75 million yuan (10.88 million U.S. dollars) in sales.

Pang was not a first time offender. In 2009, she was sentenced to three years in prison with a five-year probation period for illegally trading vaccines in Heze City, Shandong. However, the case was retried, as required by the provincial higher people's court, and in April 2016 her sentence was extended to six years in prison without probation.

The intermediate court ruled that Pang would serve 19 years in prison in total for her offenses in the two cases. In addition, all of her property would be confiscated.

The other defendant, Sun Qi, Pang's daughter, was sentenced to six years in prison for assisting her mother and involvement in the sale of vaccines worth more than 42 million yuan from September 2014 to April 2015. She will have more than 7.4 million yuan of property confiscated.

The pair were caught by the police on April 28, 2015. The next day, the police found vaccines worth nearly 700,000 yuan they had stored in the warehouse of a towel factory in Jinan.