China’s top disease control official says Chinese-developed COVID-19 vaccines have low effectiveness and the government is considering mixing them to give them a boost.
Speaking at a conference on Saturday in the southwestern city of Chengdu, the director of the China Centers for Disease Control, Gao Fu said Chinese vaccines “don’t have very high protection rates”.
China has supplied hundreds of millions of doses to other countries including Zimbabwe. Said, Gao:
It’s now under formal consideration whether we should use different vaccines from different technical lines for the immunisation process.
Sinovac, a Chinese-developed vaccine widely administered in Zimbabwe, has been found to have an effectiveness of as low as 50.4 per cent at preventing symptomatic infections by researchers in Brazil.
By comparison, the vaccine made by Pfizer-BioNTech has been found to be 97-per cent effective.
The Chinese government has yet to approve any foreign vaccines for use in China, where the coronavirus emerged in late 2019.