The director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said the government was considering mixing COVID-19 vaccines on Saturday because the country’s local doses “do not have very high protection rates”, according to AP.
Why it matters: The remarks by the Gao Fu at a news conference in the southwestern city of Chengdu Market are the first time a Chinese health official has spoken publicly about the low effectiveness of vaccines manufactured in China.
Send the news: According to Gao, officials have investigated two options to solve the problem that the efficacy of … existing vaccines is not high, according to the South China Morning Post.
- One is to mix vaccines, known as ‘sequential vaccination’, and the other is to ‘adjust the dose, increase the interval between doses or increase the number of doses’, reports the SCMP.
The plot: According to experts, the mixing of vaccines could increase the effectiveness rate, says AP.
- Scientists in the UK are conducting clinical trials on the blending of Oxford University-AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines.
The whole picture: The Chinese government has only approved local vaccines for use against the virus.
- Sinopharm announced late last year before the coronavirus vaccine was approved for use, that the vaccine was 79.3% effective, although experts said important information was missing.
- China’s health regulator approved Sinovac’s vaccine last February. Several Phase 3 trials in Brazil, Turkey and Indonesia have shown efficiency rates ranging from 50.38% to 91.25%, says Shawna Chen of Axios.
Remarkable: Gao said “everyone should consider the benefits” of mRNA vaccines, which are used by Western drugmakers as a tool against the pandemic, but not by their counterparts in China, reports AP.
What they say: Tao Lina, a vaccine expert in Shanghai who attended Gao’s news conference, told the SCMP that “the levels of antibodies generated by our vaccines are lower than mRNA vaccines and that the efficacy data are also lower”
- It is a ‘natural conclusion that our inactivated vaccines and enterovirus vaccines are less effective’ than mRNA vaccines.
- But he added: “We should not wait until a perfect vaccine is available.”
By the numbers: According to Gao, about 34 million people ‘received both the two doses that require Chinese vaccines, and about 65 million’, according to AP.
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Editor’s note: this article has been constantly updated with new details.