The wife of a Chinese official has been jailed for taking bribes from vaccine manufacturers, a court said Thursday, in a case with echoes of a major scandal that rocked China earlier this year.
The sixty-year-old woman, surnamed Guo, received a three-year sentence for soliciting 1.5 million yuan (A$290,000) in bribes from five Chinese vaccine companies, according to a ruling from the Number One Beijing Intermediate People's Court.
She is the wife of a former employee of the Chinese Food and Drug Administration, who the court documents said was complicit in the scheme.
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Guo was taken into custody in April 2015 and charged with accepting bribes in relation to four biotech firms' efforts to obtain government permits for a variety of vaccines, including those for SARS and avian flu.
A fifth firm also paid her bribes.
The sentence follows the March revelation of a massive vaccine scandal that enraged the Chinese public.
The case involved the improper storage, transport and sale of tens of millions of dollars' worth of vaccines -- many of them expired.
No one was believed to have been harmed, but the story still provoked outrage in a country where families, who were long limited to one child by government policy, fiercely protect their offspring.
Public fury erupted in March after a report revealed that information about the case had been suppressed by authorities who had arrested two key suspects nearly a year earlier.
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), the official Xinhua news agency reported at the time.
They included shots for polio, rabies, hepatitis B and flu for both children and adults, Caijing magazine said, citing drug safety officials.
