Two sentenced to prison for illegal vaccine trade in east China

Two people were handed prison terms Tuesday after being convicted of selling vaccines without a license in east China's Shandong Province, according to a local court.

Pang Hongwei was sentenced to 15 years in prison for illegally purchasing vaccines, including rabies vaccines, which she stored in warehouses in Jinan and Liaocheng, and then selling them to clients in the province and other parts of the country between June 2013 and April 2015, according to a statement from the intermediate people's court of Jinan City, capital of Shandong.

Pang improperly stored the vaccines she bought, and she earned nearly 75 million yuan (11 million U.S. dollars) in sales income, according to the statement.

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 will serve 19 years in prison in total for her offences in the two cases. In addition, all of her property will 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 over 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 a warehouse of a towel factory in Jinan.