BEIJING (Reuters) – China has accelerated its vaccinations against COVID-19 and administered ten million doses in about a week and is considering different visa policies based on vaccination and virus conditions in different countries, officials said Sunday.
Health Commission spokesperson Mi Feng administered 74.96 million doses of vaccines on Saturday. This is an increase of 64.98 million from 14 March.
According to state media and a top health adviser, China aims to vaccinate 40% of its 1.4 billion people by the middle of the year. China was one of the first countries to start administering vaccines last year, and has already exported millions of doses, but the vaccination rate has fallen below that of Israel and the United States.
More than 70 million doses of Sinovac Biotech’s shots have been administered worldwide, a company spokesman said at the news conference without specifying how many of them were administered in China.
Beijing is considering differentiated policies for issuing visas, flights and controlling the number of people arriving in China based on the vaccination and the COVID-19 situations in different countries.
“We are not currently exempting vaccinated people from testing and isolation measures,” said Feng Zijian, deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC).
But he said China would pay attention to international progress in developing ‘vaccine passports’ and that it could adapt the virus-control measures after the local population reached a high level of vaccination.
The Chinese annual vaccine production can fully meet the needs of the whole country, said the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Mao Junfeng.
He said the supply of vaccine-producing materials, including vials and syringes, was ‘relatively stable’.
Countries with a large number of elderly people should be given preference for vaccination, said Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist of China CDC.
If all countries continue at the same pace with their vaccination programs, it is possible that each country can achieve only 10% or 30% immunity, not enough to protect the population, Wu explained at the China Development Forum in Beijing on Saturday night.
“We need to reach 70% -80% in one country as soon as possible, then a second country, then a third country,” Wu said.
China has approved four locally developed vaccines for the general public through Sinovac, CanSino Biologics and two units of China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm).
A fifth vaccine developed by the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences was approved for emergency use last week.
Reporting by Roxanne Liu and Ryan Woo; Edited by William Mallard and Sam Holmes