Wu Yiling is a highly regarded scientist in China. He was also one of the world’s richest persons, with a fortune of about $6 billion. That is, until this week, when the son of another Chinese tycoon stirred an online debate by questioning Wu’s drug’s usefulness in treating Covid-19.
During the recent omicron wave, the herbal cure Lianhua Qingwen was distributed to households in Shanghai and Hong Kong as one of three traditional therapies suggested by the central government. Following a meteoric spike in Wu’s Shijiazhuang Yiling Pharmaceutical Co., Wang Sicong’s warning caused its shares plunging by the maximum 10% limit for two days in a row.
The stock subsequently continued to fall, reaching its lowest weekly low ever and a 35 percent drop from its April 11 high. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Wu and his family’s net worth has decreased $2 billion to under $4 billion.
As the country battles its deadliest epidemic since the pandemic began, debate over the efficacy of Traditional Chinese Medicine, or TCM, has heated up in recent weeks. While the government has promoted the therapies, they have yet to get approval from international regulators, and the World Health Organization has neither approved or recommended Lianhua Qingwen for the treatment of Covid-19.
On April 15, Yiling’s stock began to fall after Wang, the son of property mogul Wang Jianlin, posted a video on Weibo asking whether the WHO had ever recommended Lianhua Qingwen as a coronavirus treatment. That came after he requested that China’s securities watchdog probe Yiling on the Twitter-like platform.
Wu, the son of a doctor from Hebei province in northern China, grew interested in medicine as a teenager. In 1982, the 72-year-old earned his master’s degree in traditional Chinese medicine from Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine.
Before starting Yiling in 1992, he worked as a doctor. In 2011, the company, which makes therapies for colds, cardiovascular illnesses, cancer, and diabetes, went public on the Shenzhen stock exchange. Lianhua Qingwen was developed shortly after the SARS pandemic, and the country’s drug authority licensed it for use against the infection in 2003.
Wu was elected to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a major national government advisory body, in the same year.
While some TCM therapies are made by numerous people, Lianhua Qingwen is only made by Yiling. The capsules, which contain honeysuckle, rhubarb root, sweet wormwood herb, and other natural substances, have been approved in China as a successful treatment for mild Covid-19 symptoms like fever and sore throat. Singapore is conducting a trial after warning last year that the medication was not approved to treat the coronavirus.
Yiling has clearly benefited from the pandemic. In the first three quarters of last year, sales increased by 51% to 10.4 billion yuan ($1.6 billion), which was already 32% greater than the entire year of 2020.
