Chile locks down capital after Chinese vaccines fail to prevent new COVID wavehttps://hotair.com/allahpundit/2021/06/14/chile-locks-down-capital-after-chinese-vaccines-fail-to-prevent-new-covid-wave-n396560The point to bear in mind is that Chile has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, on par with the UK in terms of first doses administered and well ahead of the United States.
A country with that much immunity in the population shouldn’t be experiencing a wave severe enough to warrant a lockdown. Israel, for instance, is down to an average of 14 cases per day in a country of nine million people. Chile, with a little more than twice Israel’s population, is experiencing nearly 500 times as many daily cases.
... Israel vaccinated its population with Pfizer. Chile has mostly relied on China’s Sinovac vaccine. That one doesn’t use mRNA but rather old-fashioned “inactivated virus” technology. It does appear to provide some protection against serious illness — if you’ve had both doses. But it may not be nearly as good as Pfizer in preventing transmission. And if you’ve only had one dose of it instead of two, you’re at serious risk.
I'd love to know whether this problem - Chile is not alone in experiencing poor performance from Chinese inactivated virus technology vaccines - is due to the vaccine being too variant-specific or poor quality control at Sinovac and Sinopharm (both of which have HQs in Beijing, but production could be elsewhere). Given China's track record of opacity, that could be difficult to determine.
