BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s production capacity of COVID-19 vaccines could be enough to vaccinate 40% of the population by mid-2021, the country’s head of disease control authorities said on Friday.
The country’s production capacity could also be large enough to vaccinate 70% -80% of the population of 1.4 billion by the beginning of 2022, Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters the sideline said. of the annual meeting of the top advisory board of the government.
“The possibility exists,” Gao said, but warns that translating production capacity into actual products that meet the required standard is a complicated process.
He added that the estimate was his personal view as a scientist rather than an official prediction.
End China has been administered more than 52 million doses, which is less than 4 doses per 100 people, which is much lower than the level in countries like Israel and the United States.
China, which has approved four locally developed vaccines for the general public, has not disclosed how many doses it actually takes.
Sinovac Biotech said earlier this week that the annual production capacity of the firm’s two-dose vaccine CoronaVac could reach 2 billion doses by June.
A Wuhan unit of China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm) operates a facility that can deplete as many as 100 million doses of its vaccine per year, while a subsidiary of Sinopharm in Beijing has an annual capacity of 1 billion doses . a separate product. Both Synopharm units’ vaccines require two doses.
Sinopharm could expand COVID-19 vaccine production capacity to 3 billion doses per year, said Yu Qingming, chairman of Sinopharm Group, another unit of Sinopharm, which according to state media is not directly involved in COVID-19 vaccine production.
Yu did not disclose when the dose capacity will be 3 billion.
The production capacity of a single-dose vaccine from CanSino Biologics could reach 500 million doses annually, a scientist who conducted the research for the survey told state media in February.
Companies, including Shenzhen Kangtai Biological Products and Walvax Biotechnology, whose vaccine candidates have yet to be approved, have begun work on the manufacturing plant.
(Reporting by Roxanne Liu and Ryan Woo; Editing by Alex Richardson)