The admission of weakness on the part of the senior Chinese official, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Gao Fu, regarding the effectiveness of Chinese vaccines, is significant in more than one way.
China has distributed hundreds of millions of doses of locally made vaccines overseas and is counting on them for its own mass vaccination campaign. But the director of the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Gao Fu, conceded at a conference last Saturday that their effectiveness rates need to be improved, saying “They do not have very high protection rates”, he said during the press briefing held in the city of Chengdu, in the southwest of the country. This is the first time that a senior Chinese scientist has publicly acknowledged that Chinese vaccines, which use a virus to trigger the immune system, have relatively low efficacy compared to vaccines made using the experimental messenger RNA process.
In China, vaccines manufactured by Sinovac, a private company and Sinopharm, a state-owned company, constitute the majority of Chinese vaccines distributed in several dozen countries, including Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, Hungary, Morocco, United Arab Emirates and Brazil among others. Chinese vaccines are unlikely to be sold in the United States, Western Europe and Japan, health experts say, due to the complexity of the approval process. For its part, Beijing has yet to approve the use of foreign vaccines in China. “We will solve the problem that current vaccines do not have very high rates of protection,” Gao said in a presentation on Chinese Covid-19 vaccines and vaccination strategies: “It is now under study whether we should use different vaccines from different technical lines for the vaccination process ”.
Brazilian researchers found that the Sinovac vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing symptomatic infections was no more than 50.4% – near the 50% threshold by which health experts believe a vaccine is useful. In comparison, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was found to be 97% effective. Reason why the Chinese government would consider mixing them to strengthen them. Experts say mixing vaccines, or sequential immunization, could boost their effectiveness. In Great Britain, researchers are studying a possible combination of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and the traditional AstraZeneca vaccine. China currently has five vaccines used in its mass vaccination campaign, three inactivated virus vaccines from Sinovac and Sinopharm, a single dose vaccine from CanSino and the latest from Gao’s team in partnership with Anhui Zhifei Longcom.
For its part, Morocco, in order to succeed in its vaccination campaign, opted for diversification in terms of 65 million doses. Orders that are shared between several vaccines, from the British company Astra and the Swedish company, Zeneca, the Chinese state, Sinopharm and possibly from Russia with Sputnik. Two-thirds in the addition being Chinese (Sinopharm) and it seems after a long delay, a dozen million doses should be received during the month of April and May. As for AstraZeneca, delivery has stalled India, the first supplier in the Kingdom having canceled or postponed deliveries preferring the “India first” option. Also, Morocco turned to South Korea for this vaccine.
However, these statements from high Chinese health authorities should not call into question the process of vaccination of the Chinese product in Morocco or in other countries for that matter, because on a global scale, public health experts have said any vaccine that is 50% effective would be helpful. However, many governments are impatient to use Chinese vaccines while most rich countries around the world have opted for Pfizer and Moderna.
