By Eva Fu
March 11, 2022 Updated: March 15, 2022
After
receiving an initial dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, Li Jun’s 4-year-old daughter
developed a fever and began coughing, which quickly subsided following
intravenous therapy at a hospital. But after the second shot, the father could
tell something was wrong.
Swelling
appeared around his daughter’s eyes and lingered. For weeks, the girl
complained about pain in her legs, where bruises started to emerge seemingly
out of nowhere. In January, a few weeks after the second dose, the child was
diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
“My
baby was perfectly healthy before the vaccine dose,” Li (a pseudonym), from
China’s north-central Gansu Province, told The Epoch Times. “I took her for a
health check. Everything was normal.”
He’s
among hundreds of Chinese that belong to a social media group whose members
claim to be suffering from or have a household member suffering from leukemia
that developed after taking Chinese
vaccines. Eight of them confirmed the situation when contacted by The
Epoch Times; names of the interviewees have been withheld to protect their
safety.
The
leukemia cases span different age groups, and are from all parts of China. But
Li and others particularly point to a rise in youngest patients in the past few
months, coinciding with the regime’s push to inoculate children 3 to 11 years old
beginning last October.
Li’s
daughter had her first injection in mid-November at the request of her
kindergarten. She is now receiving chemotherapy at the Lanzhou No. 2 People’s
Hospital, where at least 20 children are being treated for similar symptoms,
most of them between the age of 3 and 8, according to Li.
“Our
doctor from the hospital told us that since November, the children coming to
their hematology division to treat leukemia have doubled from the previous
years’ number, and they have a shortage of beds,” he said.
Li said
that at least eight children from Suzhou district, where he lives, have died
recently from leukemia.
The
hospital’s hematology division couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.
National Pressure
Roughly
84.4 million children in the 3 to 11 age group have been vaccinated as of Nov.
13, according to the latest figures from China’s National Health Commission,
accounting for more than half of the population in that segment.
There
was some resistance from Chinese parents when the campaign to vaccinate
children began. They expressed concern about the lack of data about the effects
on young people of vaccines supplied by two Chinese drugmakers, Sinopharm
and Sinovac. They reportedly carry an efficacy rate of 79
percent and 50.4 percent, respectively, based on available data from
trials conducted on adults.
Information
is limited about the health effects of these vaccines on children, and the
World Health Organization said in late November that it hasn’t approved the two
vaccines for emergency use in children.
Parents
who were reluctant to vaccinate their children have faced pressure to comply,
with some saying they lost work bonuses or were pressured by their supervisors.
In other cases, their children faced punishment varying from losing honors or
even being barred from attending school, as in the case of Wang Long’s
10-year-old son.
“The
school told us last year to take him for vaccination on such and such date, or
he couldn’t go to class,” Wang, from China’s Shandong Province, told The Epoch
Times.
The boy
received his second dose on Dec. 4. A month later, he began experiencing
fatigue and a low fever. He is now at Shandong University Qilu Hospital, being
treated for acute leukemia that was diagnosed on Jan. 18.
Mu
Rongxue, a 75-year-old public health activist, has been pressing authorities
since the start of the inoculation drive to make public clinical data relating
to the vaccine’s effects on children, such as infection, hospitalization, and
death figures; his request was refused.
“The
data you requested requires administrative agencies to process and analyze
existing government information, and will not be provided,” the National Health
Commission said in a Nov. 12 letter, according to a screenshot that Mu
posted online.
While
he has repeatedly tried to file a lawsuit against the agency, the Beijing
Municipal High People’s Court has so far taken no action on his case, at one
point telling him that if they accept his case, “it would impact pandemic
control efforts,” according to Mu.
“If I
don’t have evidence, you can sentence me to life or even death, but why are you
afraid of my lawsuit?” he wrote in a post on China’s microblogging site Weibo
last month.
Censorship
On
WeChat, the all-in-one Chinese social media platform, Li has come to know more
than 500 patients or their family members who share the same predicament.
The
local disease control center, when called by Li and others, had promised an
investigation. But these probes invariably ended with the officials declaring
the leukemia cases as “coincidental” and thus unrelated to the vaccines.
The
authorities had said the same following the deaths of more than a dozen
toddlers after Hepatitis B shots in 2013.
But Li
and others in a similar situation are far from convinced.
“I dare
say they didn’t do any verification, but only went through the motions,” he
said.
Li
suspects that authorities are giving him the runaround. Officials told him a
panel of experts would start an investigation within his province, but when he
called the provincial level health agency, they disavowed any knowledge, saying
reports of the cases had never reached them.
Li and
others seeking scrutiny of this issue also stand little chance of having their
voices heard in the vast Chinese censorship machinery, which constantly filters
out anything deemed harmful to the communist regime’s interests.
“The
information gets blocked the instant we try to post something online. You can’t
send it out,” he said.
When
China’s two top political bodies met last week for its most important annual
gathering in what Beijing called the “Two Sessions,” Li pitched in the WeChat
group the idea of petitioning in the capital to get officials’ attention.
That
message drew the authorities’ notice immediately.
“The
police called us one by one,” said Li. “They said we have made things up and
ordered us to withdraw from the chat group.”
The
group was soon disbanded. An information sheet containing details of more than
200 leukemia patients, filled out by members of the group, is no longer
accessible.
According
to Li, there are signs indicating that authorities are well aware of the issue.
Doctors, when receiving patients with similar symptoms, would first ask them if
they had taken the vaccine, he said, citing information he learned from the
WeChat group.
“’Got
it,’ they would say. And that’s the end of it,” he said of the doctors’
questioning.
Li got
the same reaction when calling the hotline for Chinese state broadcaster CCTV
in hopes of getting media exposure.
“As
soon as we said the children had taken the COVID-19 vaccine, they asked me if
she had gotten leukemia. They knew,” he said. “They said that they got too many
calls because of this.”
Desperation
The
cost for treatment is estimated at about 400,000 to 500,000 yuan ($63,093 to
$78,867), more than 20 times the average annual income.
Wang,
whose 10-year-old was diagnosed with leukemia, is the sole breadwinner for his
family and is already under strain making mortgage payments. He received about
only 1,000 yuan ($157) through the state social assistance program to help pay
for his son’s treatment.
“I
stayed at the hospital until 4 a.m. the night before,” said Wang, adding that
the crushing news has “broken” the boy’s mother.
“Had he
inherited it from the family, we’d accept it as our lot,” Wang said. “But he
got sick because of the vaccine. I just can’t reconcile it.”
Li,
meanwhile, has been borrowing money from relatives for the hospital fees. Some
of the money trickles in as 20 and 30 yuan, the equivalent of a few dollars, he
said.
Li has
heard nothing from officials or the media, and his friend who works at the
local health commission overseeing the distribution of vaccines has told him
not to hold out much hope.
“The
officials knew that you could get leukemia, but ‘the arm is no match for the
thigh,’” the friend told him, recalling a Chinese metaphor. “This is a national
issue.”
The
Health Commission of Lanzhou City, the Health Commission of Gansu Province, the
Gansu Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the Lanzhou Disease
Prevention and Control Center, the Jiuquan City Disease Prevention and Control
Center, Sinopharm, and Sinovac didn’t answer multiple calls from The Epoch
Times seeking comment.
The
National Health Commission, Sinopharm, and Sinovac didn’t respond by press time
to email queries. The inspection team of the CPC Central Commission for
Discipline Inspection at the National Health Commission also didn’t respond to
a faxed request for comment.
Gu Xiaohua contributed to this report.
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