China has launched an ambitious effort to vaccinate 50 million people against the coronavirus ahead of next month’s new moon, after the country recently approved its own COVID-19 vaccine for general use.
The program gives priority to key groups of frontline workers, including workers in hospitals, civil service, delivery, transportation and utilities, as well as people whose jobs require them to travel overseas. Millions of people in priority groups have already received shots of the vaccine before it was approved by regulators of the state-subsidized pharmaceutical company Sinopharm as part of an “urgent use” pressure, according to The Washington Post.
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China plans to administer the first dose of the vaccine to 50 million people before January 15, and the second shot on February 5, before the New Year festivities begin on February 11. The holiday is considered the world’s largest annual human migration, as hundreds of millions of people in the country leave their cities to visit family in more rural parts of the country.
Chinese authorities are under pressure to carry out the vaccinations before the lunar New Year rush after the holiday was disrupted last year when Wuhan, China, was at the center of the outbreak. Last year, about 1.5 billion trips were made during the holidays, about half the normal number of trips because people take refuge amid the outbreak, reports The Washington Post.
Local media report On Monday, in the first two days of the new year, Beijing vaccinated 73,537 people across more than 200 vaccination sites.
The vaccine was approved on December 31st. Clinical studies have shown that the vaccine is almost 80 percent effective.
Meanwhile, health officials in Israel are working to obtain more doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, because the country has vaccinated a larger part of its population than any other country and the stock is low. Israel gives doses to about 150,000 people a day and has reached 12 percent of its population with the first dose since December 20. The Washington Post reports.
It comes as officials behind the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed acknowledge the US experienced a delay in getting the vaccine into the arms of Americans.
More than 13 million doses of COVID-19 have been distributed across the country, with more than 4.2 million people receiving the first dose as of January 2nd. CDC.
The number is far below the Trump administration’s goal of administering the first dose to 20 million Americans before January 20th.
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