The Associated Press reported yesterday that China’s top disease control official, said current vaccines offer low protection against the coronavirus, and that a possible strategy that is being considered is to mix them in order to make them more effective. “We will solve the issue that current vaccines don’t have very high protection rates,” the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention Gao Fu said at a conference in Chengdu. “It’s now under consideration whether we should use different vaccines from different technical lines for the immunization process,” continued Fu.
After the news received worldwide attention, according to the Associated Press Gao send a message to the AP, saying that he was speaking about the effectiveness rates for “vaccines in the world, not particularly for China,” and he did not respond to further questions about which vaccines he was referring to. The state-owned Global Times released an interview with Gao, in which he was quoted as saying that he was misunderstood and merely talking in general terms about improving vaccine efficacy. Meanwhile, another CDC official as reported by the AP said Chinese developers are working on mRNA-based vaccines. “The mRNA vaccines developed in our country have also entered the clinical trial stage,” said the official, Wang Huaqing.
As AP reports, “China currently has five vaccines in use in its mass immunization campaign, three inactivated-virus vaccines from Sinovac and Sinopharm, a one-shot vaccine from CanSino, and the last from Gao’s team in partnership with Anhui Zhifei Longcom.” In Albania, the government agreed in March with the Turkish company “Keymen Ilaç Sanayive Ticaret” to bring 1 million doses of Sinovac vaccines, and a massive vaccination campaign has started in the country, mainly due to the presence of the Chinese vaccine. So far, the government has not given any comment regarding the latest declaration from China’s top disease control official.
Meanwhile, in Chile, the authorities yesterday backed the country’s use of the Chinese vaccine Sinovac, after China’s top disease official appeared to make conflicting statements about its efficacy. As Reuters reports, “A real-world study of vaccination and contagion data by the University of Chile suggested last week the vaccine was 54% effective in reducing infection.” The Chilean science minister Andres Couve said it was important to focus on the fact that the vaccine is effective in reducing illness that required medical treatment or being hospitalized or dying, with 83.7% and 100% of cases respectively.
