The Chinese government has admitted that hundreds of thousands of doses of children’s vaccines are faulty, it has been reported.

The State Council of China announced that yet another batch of vaccines for diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus (DPT) that were produced by the firm Changchun Changsheng Biotechnology, were considered “substandard.” Most of the doses were sold to authorities in the Shandong province in northeastern China, and some have already been given to children.

The latest batch of 247,200 vaccines joins the 253,338 defective DPT vaccines from the same company that were discovered last November, along with more than 400,000 produced by a different company.

Changsheng was accused in July of falsifying data for a rabies vaccine and manufacturing an ineffective vaccine for babies, sparking widespread public anger and multiple probes including police investigations.

An official report found that CFDA officials “did not provide sufficient supervision, strong enough oversight, nor were they strict enough in their inspections”, the posting said.

According to the South China Morning Post, 76 percent of those children who were given injections from the first substandard batch have already been treated by doctors, and there are now plans in place to treat those who received injections from the second batch.

Although the Chinese government has done its best to prevent people from talking about the crisis, Chinese social media is still full of conversation about the topic. There have also been reports that the company used expired ingredients and altered testing records.

Last month, thousands of enraged parents expressed their anger and disappointment that their country has let them down when it comes to the handling of vaccines. The Chinese president promised swift action and a prompt investigation.

Critics have accused the government of being more concerned about ‘saving face’ than making things right with the children who were subjected to the faulty vaccines.

In the Nikkei Asian Review, Yanzhong Huang, wrote: “Officials have reportedly restricted news coverage and censors have swiftly scrubbed away widely shared essays and posts criticizing the government or spreading bad news.

“Even news reports from state-owned publications, such as an investigation into Wuhan Institute’s substandard vaccines by the newspaper Economic Observer, have been taken down.”

He called for Beijing to improve vaccine safety and for the public and the press to get involved in exposing violators. He said that whistleblowers should be viewed as heroes rather than troublemakers.

The government reported that it had removed six senior officials at the China Food and Drug Administration for their role in a scandal that left hundreds of thousands of children with faulty vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough. Another four officials accused of wrongdoing were fired after a meeting of Mr. Xi and China’s top leaders.

The dismissals were the latest attempt to quell public anger over the affair, which has hurt confidence in the nation’s health care system and raised questions about Mr. Xi’s leadership. Criticism of officials and companies has swelled since news of the defective vaccines emerged on social media last month, and parents have organized protests to demand compensation for the affected families.

Vaccines have been impounded and production has been suspended. There has also been a recall of vaccine products from foreign markets, but details on these are scarce.

In a separate report, Xinhua said the central province of Hubei has removed six government officials from their posts in relation to another inferior vaccines case involving Chinese company Wuhan Institute of Biological Products.

This latest scandal comes just a few years after it emerged that children were disabled and even killed by vaccines that were ruined after they had been transported and stored improperly.

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