Ex-official jailed over vaccine scandal

A former official of China's Food and Drug Administration has been jailed for taking bribes from vaccine manufacturers, reports said on Tuesday.

Yin Hongzhang, former deputy director of the administration's drug testing center, received a 10-year sentence and was fined 500,000 yuan ($71,800) for taking bribes to help vaccine manufacturers gain approval for their drugs, Legal Evening News reported.

Yin's wife and son earlier received prison sentences for participating in the scheme and accepting property and bribes worth 3.56 million yuan, including ivory products worth 180,000 yuan, it said.

Yin was taken into custody in April 2015 and charged with taking payouts in relation to four biotech firms' efforts to obtain government permits for a variety of vaccines, including for SARS and avian flu.

The sentence follows the revelation in March last year of a massive vaccine scandal that enraged the public.

That case involved the improper storage, transport and sale of vaccines - many of them expired.

From 2010, the pair, a mother and daughter from Shandong province in eastern China, sold 25 different kinds of expired or improperly stored vaccines worth more than 570 million yuan ($88 million), Xinhua News Agency reported at the time.