Hundreds of Chinese parents were allegedly detained to prevent them from joining the demonstration in Beijing calling for legal retribution for the substandard vaccines that plagued the country in March.
China is cracking down on parent activists protesting the emergence of "problematic" vaccines and the government's lack of legal action on the matter, a report from Time revealed.
According to the outlet, the parents who participated in the demonstration said that authorities tried to intimidate them with arbitrary arrest.
Worried Parents
In March, China was taken by storm after authorities revealed that they arrested the first batch of suspects linked to the distribution of "problematic" vaccines.
According to past reports, a mother-daughter syndicate was discovered to be distributing 570 million yuan or $88 million worth of expired, improperly stored and transported vaccines across 20 provinces in China.
The illegal vaccines were unsafe for use and are believed to cause severe side effects such as disability and death.
Because of this, some worried parents chose to travel all the way to Hong Kong for their children's immunizations, while others tried to trace the source of their kids' previous shots to determine if it was among the problematic ones.
Detention
On Tuesday, parents in Beijing marched in front of the National Health and Family Planning Commission to protest the lack of legal action on the matter.
"We are calling for a vaccines law, because there is no legislation covering vaccinations right now, and families who have been victims of this disaster have no judicial redress," Radio Free Asia quoted parent activist Liu Lixin on Tuesday.
According to Liu, some 70 to 80 people were gathered in front of the NHFPC, some of whom also filed lawsuits.
"We also demand that they properly handle the consequences in the aftermath," Liu declared.
On the surface, the parents appeared to have been treated fairly as campaigner Liu Lijun, one of the protesting parents who sued, told the RFA how their lawsuits went "extremely smoothly."
But unknown to them, some of their comrades were targeted by authorities.
"I had planned to take part [in the Beijing protests and lawsuits], but I was forcibly escorted home by officials from my hometown on April 13. Now they are watching us 24 hours a day, so we weren't able to go," Wang Liangqing told the RFA on the day of the demonstration.
According to Liu, almost 1,000 parents from 700 families were taken to a detention facility in Jiujingzhuang.
"The government crackdown on the officials should be viewed as a pre-emptive strategy to prevent further legitimacy problems for the regime," Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow for global health Yanzhong Huang told Time.
However, Yanzhong admitted that he was unsure if the "crackdown in itself would lead to sustained and effective regulations of the vaccine-safety-efficacy problem."