Mainland’s First Free HPV Vaccination Program Launched in Remote Northern County

A remote part of North China has become the first place on the Chinese mainland to administer free vaccines against a virus that causes cervical cancer, but women nationwide continue to face high barriers to access.

Authorities in Jungar Banner, a county-level jurisdiction in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, began inoculating almost 10,000 schoolgirls between 13 and 18 years old against the human papillomavirus (HPV) at the start of August as part of a women’s health campaign, according to a statement posted on the local health bureau’s WeChat account.

The shots protect against a common sexually transmitted type of virus that can cause cancers of the cervix, genitals, anus and throat. Cervical cancer killed about 48,000 women in China in 2018, according to a report published last year by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an intergovernmental body affiliated with the World Health Organization (WHO).

The vaccination drive signals a step toward widening access to a treatment that remains hard to obtain in China. While HPV vaccines have been available at public hospitals since 2016, scarce supplies, high prices and patchy public awareness have thwarted widespread inoculation.

Part of the problem stems from China’s medical approval procedures, which critics have lambasted as grindingly slow.

Although the first HPV vaccines appeared as early as 2006, China only approved the sale of Cervarix, a two-valent vaccine developed by British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), a decade later. Two-valent vaccines guard against two strains of HPV.

In 2017, China approved a four-valent HPV vaccine produced by the U.S.-headquartered Merck & Co. called Gardasil.

At the time, public health systems in many developed countries were already phasing out the two- and four-valent vaccines and replacing them with Gardasil-9, a Merck-developed treatment effective against nine varieties of HPV. China eventually approved Gardasil-9 in 2018.

Last year, the country approved its first domestically produced HPV vaccine, a two-valent shot that officials said would grant women an alternative to using foreign-made treatments.

Qiao Youlin, a professor at a cancer hospital affiliated to the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, told Caixin that authorities in Jungar were administering the GSK vaccine.

In recent years, health experts and government officials in China have put pressure on the government to commit to a nationwide HPV vaccination scheme.

At the Two Sessions annual political meetings in May, Yu Luming, a member of the country’s top political advisory body, proposed inoculating all girls in China between 9 and 14 years old, in line with WHO guidelines.

But when asked if the Jungar project might be extended nationwide or incorporated into government immunization programs, Qiao said “great difficulties” still stood in the way of a larger rollout, with the exception of certain cities.

Problems accessing HPV vaccines on the Chinese mainland spur many women to travel to Hong Kong and other territories whose health systems have made the treatments more freely available.

They buttress a thriving outbound medical tourism market worth $10 billion a year, according to the research firm Global Growth Markets.

Contact reporter Matthew Walsh (matthewwalsh@caixin.com) and editor Michael Bellart (michaelbellart@caixin.com)