BEIJING, April 20 (UPI) -- In a bid to restore public confidence and wipe the slate clean on its mishandling of the mounting SARS crisis, the Chinese government Sunday fired the country's health minister and Beijing's mayor.
The government reshuffle came in a brief statement released in the state-run media which said, "Zhang Wenkang was removed from the post of the secretary of the leading Party members' group of the Ministry of Health of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and Meng Xuenong has been removed from the post of the deputy secretary of the CPC Beijing Municipal Committee."
Meng was also removed as a member of the CPC Beijing Municipal Committee and replaced by Wang Qishan, a senior party and government official from Hainan province in southern China, the statement noted.
Moreover, Wang takes up the posts of deputy secretary of the CPC Beijing Municipal Committee, member of the Standing Committee of the CPC Beijing Municipal Committee and member of the CPC Beijing Municipal Committee.
In addition, the Communist Party's Central Committee appointed Gao Qiang secretary of the leading CPC members' group of the Ministry of Health.
Gao met with the press before the announcement of Zhang Wenkang's ouster had been made public in what was his first press conference as the new person in charge.
He started with a criticism of the previous leadership. "In terms of our work, the Ministry of Health was not well prepared against the sudden public health hazards and its epidemic prevention system was relatively weak. Following the outbreak, the Ministry failed to institute a timely and unified mechanism for collecting, processing and reporting the relevant information nationwide and it did not give out clear cut instructions or effective guidance," Gao said.
"Due to a lack of a sound system of information collection, surveillance reporting and contact tracing there have appeared major weaknesses in statistics compilation on the epidemic on the part of the relevant agencies and accurate figures have not been reported to higher authorities in a timely manner," he added.
Gao said, "such remises in our work should be earnestly redressed and we will draw experiences and lessons from this to effectively improve our work."
One significant move is that the SARS health crisis is now in the hands of the Beijing municipality.
"Beijing is explicitly instructed to put in place a unified leading mechanism for combating epidemics under which the municipal government of Beijing takes overall leadership of epidemic control efforts by all party, government, military and civilian agencies as well as all companies and institutions," Gao remarked.
"Beijing's municipal government will also take centralized command of all health and medical resources and will be responsible for collecting, pooling together and reporting of the information," Gao said.
Gao warned "the responsible officials in various localities and agencies will be held accountable for any failure to get to accurate information as a result of ineffective work and for any attempt to hide the true situation."
"The epidemic reporting system will be tightened all medical institutions will be required to strengthen disease monitoring, compile timely and accurate statistics about epidemic cases, and report them truthfully to relevant government agencies. No delays in reporting or underreporting or cover-ups will be on any account allowed," he added.
To restore public confidence, Gao said, "to keep the people throughout the country informed about the developments of the epidemic situation in a timely manner, the State Council has decided that as of Monday information will be released on daily basis instead of once every five days."
While these moves give China a fresh start in dealing with a health crisis for which it has been roundly lambasted publicly by the foreign media and privately among Chinese citizens, it will take more than a simple change in personnel to restore badly shaken confidence.
At Sunday's press conference, United Press International asked Gao to explain the mechanism for daily reporting.
"I'm not especially in charge of the press and media work in the Ministry of Health, so I won't be here every day to report to you about cases; this information will probably be released by some media organizations," he said.
"No matter what form this endeavor will take, the idea is to ensure that every journalist is concerned about the prevention and treatment of SARS in China will be promptly informed," Gao promised.
UPI followed up asking Gao since the Ministry is going to be open with numbers, will this extend to information on the cost to fight the disease, including the Ministry of Health's current budget, what it has allocated for SARS and how it will be divided between the central and local governments.
"I think that this is my special area because I worked as the vice minister of finance for many years," Gao said.
"How much money I've got, and how much money is needed, I can only tell you that this is an'X'."
"However I can make a commitment here that the Chinese government has already asked the financial authorities and both the central and local government to appropriate significant portions of their revenues to the prevention and the treatment of SARS with a view to its eventual elimination," Gao added.
"At this special point it is difficult for me to tell you the exact figure that will be needed under the budget, but we have an understanding with the Ministry of Finance that as long as the request for funding by the Ministry of Health is reasonable and is based on scientific ways, then Finance will give us vigorous support," Gao said.
"So I don't think that a shortage of funding will be a problem for coping with this disease."
