Uncovering China’s Vaccine Procurement: A Province‑Level Data Crawl and Analysis

Background

The author independently gathered publicly released procurement data for second‑class vaccines across Chinese provinces, aiming to provide an objective technical overview of the recent vaccine supply issue without representing any organization.

Data Collection

Using keywords such as "province + second‑class vaccine + procurement" and similar variations, the author scraped data from government websites for 28 provinces (excluding Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Shandong, Qinghai, and Tibet where data were unavailable). Challenges included mandatory login, broken links, image‑only pages, and missing information.

Data Format

All records were standardized into a CSV file with the following columns:

name : generic vaccine name

src : source (domestic or imported)

create_company : manufacturing company

report_company : reporting company (filled with manufacturing company if empty)

prov : province

year : winning year

Current Dataset Status

Completed CSV files are available for 14 provinces (e.g., Jilin, Sichuan, Tianjin, Ningxia, Anhui, Shanxi, Guangdong, Xinjiang, Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Hainan, Guizhou, Liaoning, Heilongjiang). Data for 13 other provinces remain to be processed.

Analysis

All CSVs were merged, yielding 1,529 rows. Using pandas and echart, the author computed basic statistics for the number of products per manufacturer:

count    167.000000
mean       9.143713
std       15.839281
min        1.000000
25%        1.000000
50%        3.000000
75%        9.000000
max       98.000000

The distribution is heavily right‑skewed, indicating that a few large manufacturers dominate the market. The top ten manufacturers by product count are:

Beijing Kexing Biological Products Co., Ltd. – 98

Changchun Changsheng Biotechnology Co., Ltd. – 91

Hualan Biological Vaccine Co., Ltd. – 72

Yuxi Watson Biotechnology Co., Ltd. – 57

Shanghai Institute of Biological Products Co., Ltd. – 56

Dalian Yalifeng Biopharma Co., Ltd. – 51

Changchun Biological Products Research Institute – 50

Huabei Pharmaceutical Jintan Biotech Co., Ltd. – 46

Liaoning Chengda Biotechnology Co., Ltd. – 44

Beijing Zhifei Green Bamboo Biopharma Co., Ltd. – 43

Provincial Share of Major Manufacturer

In the 14 provinces with available data, the share of the leading manufacturer (often Changchun Changsheng) ranges from about 10% to 20%:

[{'name': 'Tianjin', 'value': 14.06},
 {'name': 'Liaoning', 'value': 17.65},
 {'name': 'Heilongjiang', 'value': 13.27},
 {'name': 'Anhui', 'value': 9.76},
 {'name': 'Xinjiang', 'value': 16.95},
 {'name': 'Jiangsu', 'value': 14.56},
 {'name': 'Jiangxi', 'value': 12.18},
 {'name': 'Shanxi', 'value': 16.52},
 {'name': 'Jilin', 'value': 17.86},
 {'name': 'Guizhou', 'value': 14.18},
 {'name': 'Guangdong', 'value': 13.45},
 {'name': 'Sichuan', 'value': 16.94},
 {'name': 'Ningxia', 'value': 17.5},
 {'name': 'Hainan', 'value': 14.29}]

Visualizations

Box‑plot and bar‑chart images illustrate the skewed distribution and provincial shares (images retained from the original article).

Limitations

The dataset is incomplete; data for several provinces could not be retrieved due to login restrictions or missing online records. The author spent over 14 hours on data collection and processing, and the work will be updated on GitHub when more data become available.