The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Director Gao Fu, is step back comments he made about the country’s COVID-19 vaccines.
The vaccines “do not have very high protection rates”, Gao said at a conference in Chengdu. “It is now formally being considered whether we should use different vaccines from different technical lines of the vaccination process,” he added, explaining that China is considering a number of different options to increase efficacy. An increase in dose, mixing of vaccines or the use of mRNA technology (the kind used in the highly effective and safe Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines) were all on the table.
The remarks were remarkable for a number of reasons. For one, it was simply a “rare admission” from Beijing, The Associated Press write. But, more importantly, China has already exported hundreds of millions of doses of two vaccines developed by Chinese drug manufacturers, Sinovac and Sinopharm, to dozens of countries, including Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, Hungary and Brazil. It could therefore turn into a global predicament.
Now, however, Gao tells Chinese state media that the response to his remarks was “a complete misunderstanding” and that he actually only suggested that the question of vaccine efficacy is a “question to be considered by scientists”. the world “because of the novelty of the virus. However, he did not specifically address the protection levels of the Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines.
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