The pandemic is boosting sellers of traditional medicine

is a bad time to get sick, especially in poor countries. As conventional medicines become scarce and pricey, desperate patients turn to cheaper herbal remedies to treat even serious illnesses like diabetes, cancer and, these days, covid-19. Many doctors, of the scrub-wearing variety, doubt those treatments’ effectiveness. But the business of peddling them is in rude health.In 2021 sales of Yiling Pharmaceutical, a big maker of traditional Chinese medicines including , used against covid, among various other ailments, exceeded 10bn yuan ($1.6bn), nearly double the figure in pre-pandemic 2019. Amid recent Chinese covid outbreaks in March and April Yiling’s market capitalisation surpassed $11bn. It has since come down but remains three times what it was before the pandemic. Beijing Tongrentang, another large manufacturer, has doubled in value since the start of 2020, also to $11bn. Both companies have outperformed Pfizer and AstraZeneca, two Western producers of indisputably effective covid-19 vaccines (see chart).