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China’s Center for Disease Control is thinking about mixing vaccines and varying the sequence of doses to boost efficacy. It is the first time a government body has discussed publicly that there are concerns over the effectiveness of Chinese jabs.
Gao Fu, the CDC head, told a forum on Saturday that the agency was “considering how to solve the problem that the efficacy of existing vaccines is not high”, according to local media.
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Some of the WeChat social-media posts on Gao’s remarks were swiftly censored, according to Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“It is the first time . . . a government official publicly admitted that the protection rate is a concern in the vaccination drive,” Huang added.
China had administered 65m doses across the country by the middle of March.
Unlike other vaccine producers, China’s manufacturers have not published their phase 3 trial data, leading to accusations of a lack of transparency over the vaccine’s effectiveness on different groups.
Any new strategy will have ramifications for the more than 20 countries that China said it was supplying in mostly bilateral “vaccine diplomacy” deals. As of March, China had supplied 40m doses abroad.
Chile is facing another Covid wave from new variants, despite a successful rollout of China’s Sinovac vaccine.
The efficacy of a single dose was only 3 per cent, compared with 56 per cent with two shots. Experts have not linked the latest wave to the vaccine’s efficacy rate.