“The protection rates of existing vaccines are not high,” Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a conference in the southwestern city of Chengdu on Saturday.
He listed two options to solve the problem: one is to increase the number of doses, or to adjust the dose or interval between shots; the other is to mix vaccines developed from different technologies.
China has positioned itself as a leader in the development and distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, promoting and supplying its vaccines to countries around the world, including Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Turkey and Brazil.
“More than 60 countries have approved the use of Chinese vaccine. The safety and effectiveness of Chinese vaccine is widely recognized by various countries,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told a news conference in March.
However, the relatively low efficiency rate of Chinese vaccines could hamper credibility and affect Beijing’s so-called vaccine diplomacy.
The two pharmaceutical companies that supply the most Chinese Covid-19 vaccines to the world have not published comprehensive clinical trial data in medical journals on the efficacy of their vaccines. But from the interim results released by the companies, their effectiveness falls far behind the new type of vaccine developed in the West, which uses mRNA to elicit an immune response.
The CoronaVac vaccine developed by Sinovac, a private company, was found to have an efficacy rate of only 50.4% in clinical trials in Brazil. Another trial in Turkey showed that it was 83.5% effective. State-controlled Sinopharm said the two vaccines had 79.4% and 72.5%, respectively.
In comparison, the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines have efficacy rates of 97% and 94%, respectively.
In that sense, Gao’s remarks about the relatively low efficacy of Chinese vaccines were merely a well-known fact, but this was the first time a senior official in China had publicly acknowledged this.
“What struck me most was that the proposal for the relatively low efficacy rates of Chinese vaccines seems to be a departure from what the Chinese state and social media have said. The official story portrays Chinese vaccines as safe and effective,” he said. Yanzhong Huang said. , a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who posted Gao’s speech on Twitter over the weekend.
As Gao’s comments were treated on social media and made international headlines, Chinese censors quickly scrambled discussions online, and the state media quickly posted an interview with Gao to return his comments.
“The protection rates of all vaccines in the world are sometimes high and sometimes low. How to improve their effectiveness is a question that needs to be considered by scientists around the world,” Gao said.
Huang, China’s public health expert, said the rapid rejection by the Global Times suggested that Chinese authorities would not tolerate any challenge to their official narrative.
“Gao’s remarks were just a departure,” he said.
Additional reporting by Reuters.