Top Chinese official admits vaccines have low effectivenesshttps://apnews.com/article/china-gao-fu-vaccines-offer-low-protection-coronavirus-675bcb6b5710c7329823148ffbff6ef9China has distributed hundreds of millions of doses of domestically made vaccines abroad and is relying on them for its own mass immunization campaign.
But the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Gao Fu, said at a conference Saturday their efficacy rates needed improving.
“We will solve the issue that current vaccines don’t have very high protection rates,†Gao said in a presentation on Chinese COVID-19 vaccines and immunization strategies at a conference in the southwestern city of Chengdu. “It’s now under consideration whether we should use different vaccines from different technical lines for the immunization process.â€
He also praised the benefits of mRNA vaccines, the technology behind the two vaccines seen as the most effective, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, months after questioning whether the then-unproven method was safe.
In a message to The Associated Press, Gao said late Sunday night he was speaking about the effectiveness rates for “vaccines in the world, not particularly for China.†He did not respond to further questions about which vaccines he was referring to.
Some interesting points in this:
1. The Director of China's CDC conceded that the vaccines being heavily sold abroad work poorly.
2. The Director of China's CDC conceded that the mRNA vaccine technology China has been belittling is actually quite effective.
3. The Director of China's CDC's comment can be taken to mean that the export vaccines are not what is in use in China, or (more like, IMO) that the vaccine works OK in China, because the virus variants circulating in China are not what are currently circulating in other countries (e.g. in Chile, a Chinese vaccine buyer that is currently experiencing a surge).
That Chinese vaccines (specifically, Sinovac and Sinopharm) might be well short of excellent is not news to me, though I've said little because the information I had seen before this was more suggestive than definitive. At present it looks like the choice of technology, weakened virus, used in the Chinese vaccines yields a vaccine that is too variant-specific within a technology type that is usually in the 70% effective range.
The only other Covid vaccine I'm aware of that uses traditional weakened virus technology is one developed in India that recently began testing. The J&J and AZ vaccines use viral vector technology, different from weakened virus or mRNA technologies.
