Foreign vaccine makers need to understand system to succeed in China, says analyst

The China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) has asked the country’s second-biggest rabies vaccine maker Changchun Changsheng Biotechnology to terminate the production of its Vero-cell rabies vaccines in July 2018 for violating the country’s drug production quality protocols.

As a result, millions of infuriated parents have started looking for safer ways to vaccinate their children. Even though this presents a window of opportunity for foreign vaccine makers, they need to understand the country’s two-category vaccination system and culturally-specific drivers of vaccine-hesitation to succeed in the market, says data and analytics company GlobalData.

The Chinese childhood vaccination market is sizable. In 2018, there are an estimated 16.7 million newborns in China, about four times as many as the USA. With the new relaxed birth control policies that allow at least two children for families, the market is expected to increase in the future.