Chinese COVID-19 vaccines “don’t have very high protection rates”, according to the Chinese CDC Director.
Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Gao Fu said that Chinese COVID-19 vaccines “don’t have very high protection rates”.
OneNews reported that in a rare admission of the weakness of Chinese COVID-19 vaccines, China’s top disease control official said that their effectiveness was low and the Chinese government was considering mixing them in order to get a boost.
Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Gao Fu on Saturday said at a conference in the southwestern city of Chengdu that Chinese COVID-19 vaccines “don’t have very high protection rates”, adding that it’s under formal consideration whether they should use different COVID-19 vaccines from different technical lines for the vaccination process.
Beijing had distributed hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses abroad while trying to promote doubt about the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine made by BioNTech SE and Pfizer Inc. using the previously experimental messenger RNA (mRNA) process.
Officials at a news conference on Sunday didn’t respond directly to questions about Gao Fu’s comment or possible changes in official plans. However, another CDC official said that developers were working on mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines.
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Based on a report on OneNews, experts said that mixing COVID-19 vaccines, or sequential vaccination, might boost effectiveness.
Researchers in the United Kingdom were studying a possible combination of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine and the traditional AstraZeneca-Oxford COVID-19 vaccine.
The coronavirus pandemic, which started in central China in late 2019, marked the first time the Chinese drug industry had played a role in responding to a global health emergency.
According to the foreign ministry, COVID-19 vaccines made by Sinopharm and Sinovac Biotech had been exported to 22 countries — including the Philippines, Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, Hungary, Brazil, and Turkey.
The effectiveness of a Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine at preventing symptomatic coronavirus infections was found to be as low as 50.4% by researchers in Brazil. By comparison, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine had been found to be 97% effective.
Health experts said that Chinese COVID-19 vaccines were unlikely to be sold to the United States, Japan, and Western Europe because of the complexity of the approval process.
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