This is a rare admission of weakness from a senior Chinese official. The director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Gao Fu, admitted on Saturday (April 10) that the effectiveness of Chinese vaccines was low. They “Do not have very high protection rates”, he said at a conference in the southwestern city of Chengdu. Reason why the Chinese government would consider mixing them to strengthen them.
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. Gao Fu’s remarks undermine the efforts of the Chinese government, which continues to extol the merits of national vaccines and which distributes hundreds of millions of doses abroad, while sowing doubt on Western alternatives, in particular the RNA-type Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
“The question of whether we should use different vaccines from different technical lines for the vaccination process is now officially under review”, Mr. Gao added. Another official at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Wang Huaqing, said Chinese developers are working on messenger RNA vaccines. “RNA vaccines developed in our country have also entered the clinical trial phase”, he explained, without giving a timetable for a possible use.
Combinations under study
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.
In China, vaccines manufactured by Sinovac, a private company, and Sinopharm, a state-owned company, made up the majority of Chinese vaccines distributed in several dozen countries, including Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, Hungary and Brasil. 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.
A spokesperson for Sinovac, Liu Peicheng, acknowledged that varying levels of effectiveness were seen, but said this could be due to the age of people in a study, the strain of the virus and the other factors.
While Mr. Gao did not give any details about possible changes in strategy, he cited messenger RNA as a possibility. “Everyone should consider the benefits that RNA vaccines can bring to humanity., did he declare. We must follow it carefully and not ignore it just because we already have several types of vaccines. “ Gao Fu had previously questioned the safety of messenger RNA vaccines, as had Chinese state media and science blogs.
Chinese vaccines are unlikely to be sold in the United States, Western Europe and Japan, according to health experts, due to the complexity of the approval process. For its part, Beijing has yet to approve the use of foreign vaccines in China.
As of April 2, some 34 million people in China had received the two doses required for Chinese vaccines and about 65 million had received one, according to Gao. China has set itself the target of injecting a first dose to 40% of its population (or 560 million inhabitants) by the end of June.