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China mulls mixing Covid-19 vaccines to boost efficacy: Official
China’s top disease control official has said Beijing is considering missing Covid-19 vaccines to boost efficacy as the country expands its inoculation programme
China’s top disease control official has said Beijing is considering missing Covid-19 vaccines to boost efficacy as the country expands its inoculation programme.
Gao Fu, the director of Chinese Centre of Disease Control (CDC) has said that mixing doses is one way to boost efficacy as vaccines “don’t have very high rates of protection”.
“Inoculation using vaccines of different technical lines is being considered,” Gao was quoted as saying in agency reports at a conference in the city of Chengdu.
Following reports that interpreted Gao’s statement as an admission of the lack of vaccine efficacy, the top expert appeared to backtrack.
Gao told Global Times that “…protection rates of all vaccines in the world are sometimes high, and sometimes low”. “How to improve their efficacy is a question that needs to be considered by scientists around the world,” he said.
“In this regard, I suggest that we can consider adjusting the vaccination process, such as the number of doses and intervals and adopting sequential vaccination with different types of vaccines,” Gao added.
China has developed four domestic vaccines, which are approved for public use; a fifth is being used for smaller-scale emergency inoculation.
The country will likely produce 3 billion doses by the end of the year, a health official said over the weekend.
China’s top health authority, the national health commission (NHC) on Sunday also urged local authorities to “…halt mandatory vaccination orders as some cities were reportedly found to adopt compulsory measures to meet the country’s goal of vaccinating 560 million people by June”.
Mi Feng, the NHC spokesperson was quoted by state media as saying that “some places adopted inappropriate measures, including a ‘one-size-fits-all’ or ‘compulsory for all’ approach, which needs to be corrected”.
In one case, officials from the township of Wancheng in south China’s Hainan province had to revoke a controversial inoculation notice which claimed that people who did not take the shot would be banned from public transport and from entering public venues such as restaurants and supermarkets.
Until Saturday, China had administered 164.47 million doses, making it the second-fastest country in the world after the US in terms of inoculation numbers.
Beijing has also offered its vaccines around the world, shipping millions of doses abroad. Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Pakistan, Brazil, Chile, Ukraine, Zimbabwe, and Tunisia are among the countries, which have ordered Chinese vaccines.
“Some nations are relying heavily on Chinese vaccines for their covid-19 vaccination programmes. The majority of those administered by the UAE, for example, are made by Sinopharm. Serbia looks set to receive another 500 000 Sinopharm doses, having already taken delivery of 1.5 million. Cambodia and Egypt have received shipments of 300 000 doses at a time,” the British Medical Journal said in a report last week.
