[switknee]

It's a traditional medicine for malaria, and the reason china wasn't exporting it was due to the military importance of anti-malaria medicine. This was a thing before Bill Gates was rich or powerful. Since then, I'm not really aware of any suppression of the drug. The only anti-malaria treatment which has been suppressed by US interests is the vaccine, because they didn't believe it was profitable. Now that it is profitable, they're going forward with it.

Now that the white wormwood based treatment is known worldwide, there are questions about whether it should be kept in reserve like quinine. I'm not sure if things have changed, but I recall an approach is to give Artemisinin alongside another treatment, to prevent malaria from adapting. In africa, people will commonly listen to the doctor's instruction to take the whole course of medicine and will ignore it and just take half. They give the other half to a relative. This causes treatment resistant malaria to develop.