Officials acknowledge that Chinese vaccines have little effectiveness as the country investigates mixed shots.

The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention is well aware of the existing problems with coronavirus vaccines in the country and is investigating the possibility of mixing vaccines to improve them. The vaccines manufactured by China have “not very high protection rates”, the director of the China Centers for Disease Control, Gao Fu, said at a conference on Saturday. The remarks come down to a rare example of a Chinese official acknowledging questions about the effectiveness of the country’s vaccinations that are widely distributed abroad.

In order to address the problems, China is ‘formally’ considering whether to mix vaccines to improve its effectiveness. Another possible solution could be to change how the doses are distributed and the space between each shot. China has previously tried to question the new vaccines, such as those from Pfizer and Moderna, which use the new messenger RNA technology. But now China is working on its own MRNA vaccine.

Gao’s words spread quickly on social media, but were later censored. “This is the first time. . . “A government official has publicly acknowledged that the protection figure is a concern in the vaccination operation,” Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow on global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Financial Times. None of the Chinese vaccines published Phase 3 trial data, leading to questions about transparency, even though it sells millions of doses abroad. A recent study of the Sinovac vaccine in Chile found that the effectiveness of one shot of the vaccine was only 3 percent, compared to 56 percent with two shots. The country’s Sinopharm vaccine claims to have an efficiency rate of 79 percent after two shots.

After his statement quickly spread around the world, Gao tried to control damage by claiming that his words had been misinterpreted. “It was a complete misunderstanding,” he told the Chinese newspaper Global Times, which is in line with the Chinese Communist Party. ‘The protection rates of all vaccines in the world are sometimes high and sometimes low. “How to improve their efficiency is a question that needs to be considered by scientists around the world,” Gao said. “In this regard, I suggest that we may consider adjusting the vaccination process, such as the number of doses and intervals and adopting successive vaccinations with different types of vaccinations.”