He Fangmei

Based in Xinxiang, Henan province, He Fangmei (何方美) is a woman human rights defender and an advocate for vaccine safety. She began seeking accountability and compensation after her daughter was paralysed with a neurological disease after receiving defective vaccines in March 2018 when she was 10 months old. She then co-founded "Home for Vaccine Babies" (疫苗宝宝之家),an informal network of families whose young children became seriously ill or disabled as a result of receiving defective vaccines. She and her husband travel to Beijing frequently to seek medical care for their daughter and to petition government offices in the capital to press for State and corporate accountability for the negligence in the oversight, procurement, production and dissemination of vaccines.

In March 2019, she was arrested while fundraising on the streets of Beijing along with other families whose children were victims of defective vaccines. She was then taken back to Henan and placed under a 15-day of administrative detention followed by criminal detention on the charge of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble". She was subsequently put on trial in November 2019. In January 2020, she was released after the local prosecutors withdrew the charges against her. She has since continued her advocacy and petition trips to various government offices in Henan and in Beijing, for which she faces frequent police harassment, surveillance, and interception. Her and other affected families' advocacy contributed to the introduction and adopting of a national vaccines law which went into effect on 1 December 2019.