Thread by @BoldorRan

😷How to Save 5 Million Shekels in 5 Minutes?😷
Police in Israel ceased 1.5M flawed masks imported from China, media reported this week. The procurement was (poorly) handled by the MoD on behalf of the MoH.
Heavy WEBINT thread, translated from Heb. let's go.

Flawed Chinese products again. Just Can’t trust China!

Or... does the fault lie here on the Israeli buyer?
Was there any action that could have prevented this debacle?
I claim - there was. It would have taken me 5 minutes, and for the MoD - much less than 5M NIS ($1.44M).

So frustrating to find the problem only after the shipment arrived in IL and $ changed hands. I’m not involved in procurement processes, bigger experts than me are plenty. But I wonder if those involved have turned all stones (Nope).

As a frequent flyer on Chinese online DBs, I'll that verifying suppliers is a complicated challenge. In this period of uncertainty It is better to follow a lead based on personal, trustworthy contacts.

But there are several checks to be employed on any product to mitigate risks. It is necessary to search the product in relevant resources of Chinese authorities - in Chinese.

China has a National Medical Products Administration (NMPA). Since March the NMPA has been issuing Excel files with provincial/national-level registrations of main products of interest in the field - masks, gowns, thermometers, diagnosis kits and ventilators.

At first this reg. was mandatory for exports, as a direct response to global complaints against low-quality of Chinese medical products. Requirements have eased since then, but the Excels are being updated still.

https://twitter.com/BoldorRan/status/1246166233667588097

So these regs. are a form of guarantee by a national organ. It may serve as prelim step to verify if a product is recognized for medical use and produced by a credible source. If a producer is not on the NMPA lists - at least proceed with caution.

In order to avoid manual review of half a dozen Excels every morning, Head of Data @Boldor Webint, Shira Stein, has brandished a dashboard covering all NMPA reg. Records.
boldor.net/chinamedicalnm…

Feel free to browse and search the source of your own masks. Better to use Chinese, as *English names are mostly auto-translated*. The enables quick search and monitoring trends. Analysis of the records using a dynamic dashboard is so empowering. Digitalization is the best.

Let us now examine two examples now, beginning with the IL MoD’s failed deal. First stop is the video uploaded by the MoD to YouTube, documenting the shipped stock.

I managed to grab a frame showing the producer’s name in Chinese - 黟县松林生物工程有限公司, or in English - Yixian Songlin Bioengineering.

Yixian is the name of the county in Anhui Province where the producer is located. Songlin is the company’s core name. Let us search both Songling and the county in English and Chinese -

No results. Meaning - NMPA has no record of registration granted to any company called Songlin or in Yixian County.
So the MoD’s lead in this specific case would have been filtered out already at this initial step...

Second example, this time with a happy ending. We took the case of Itzik Xi, Head of the CRI Hebrew Department, who alongside other co-workers donated 10k masks to Israel in late March.
facebook.com/crihebrew/post…

I asked Itzik how could he tell if the masks were legit. I was relieved when he affirmed that the NMPA lists are used by domestic consumers to verify quality. Itzik received a recommendation from a trustworthy colleague, and then crossed it with NMPA records.

Let us trace the producer and check in the DB. This is one video documenting the shipment -

I kinda like extracting intel from vids. See name in blue at the bottom of the package.

Producer’s name is 山东朱氏药业集团, English - Shandong Zhushi Pharmaceutical. A quick search shows that Zhushi does exist in the records, with a total of five registrations, all granted in Shandong.

Many producers have several products registered. This in itself may serve as some kind of indication to credibility. This layer of untold data can only be seen from an overlooking dashboard.

In these cases (in fact always) it is useful to check the registration number, which is unique for every product. I would dare say that if a product does not have such reg. no. - re-consider the deal.

The package in Itzik’s hand has a reg. no. that we can check -

The reg. No. is a series of 15 characters - 4 letters indicating the approving authority (province/national) and 11 digits. Let’s take the digit part - 20192140064 - and run it on the DB.

One record with the string, and in fact identical with the package (SM is our technical addition, short for Surgical Masks). The record itself shows that the company is indeed Shandong Zhushi. Q.E.D.

Some will doubt - how can you believe any info coming from China nowadays? Honest reply - Not sure. The lists might be meaningless. There are changes in the records, but that’s understandable. Also possible that producers take effort to be listed, and that corruption exists.

But, say, the Spanish Government buying Shenzhen BioEasy’s kits, only to find them improper for use after shipment? If they had searched the NMPA records they would have noted that BioEasy’s kit is not registered, and could have avoided the debacle from the start.

All this of course is just the first simple step in a longer due-diligence process, which continues on to verifying standards, test labs, technical docs, contracts. But before you rush to buy medical gear - do try the dashboard first, or contact us.