Dr Sin Hang Lee, a Chinese pathologist now practising in the US, has written to China’s drug regulator, the China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA), to reconsider its decision last July to approve Cervarix, which is designed to prevent cervical cancer. GSK has announced it hopes to make the vaccine available in China from 2017, a move that could generate as much as $64bn if all the 143 million girls and young women aged between nine and 25 were vaccinated.

But Dr Lee, who earned his medical degree in China before moving to the US, has said in an open letter to the CFDA that there is no evidence that the HPV vaccines—Gardasil, manufactured by Merck, is the other—have prevented even a single case of cervical cancer. Worse, the vaccines have been associated with tens of thousands of adverse reactions in young girls, ranging from chronic disabilities to death.