The effectiveness of a coronavirus vaccine from Sinovac was found to be up to 50.4 percent by researchers.
In the rare recognition of the weakness of Chinese coronavirus vaccines, the country’s top official for diseases says that their effectiveness is low and that the government is considering mixing it to give them a boost.
Chinese vaccines “do not have very high protection rates,” the director of the China Centers for Disease Control, Gao Fu, said at a conference in the southwestern city of Chengdu on Saturday.
Beijing has distributed hundreds of millions of doses in other countries.
“It is now formally being considered whether we should use different vaccinations from different technical lines for the vaccination process,” Gao said.
The researchers in Brazil found that the effectiveness rate of a coronavirus vaccine from Sinovac, a Chinese developer, to prevent symptomatic infections is up to just 50.4 percent. By comparison, the vaccine made by Pfizer-BioNTech was found to be 97 percent effective.
Beijing has yet to approve foreign vaccines for use in China, where the coronavirus originated in late 2019.
Gao did not elaborate on possible changes in strategy, but called mRNA, a previously experimental technique used by some Western vaccine developers, while China’s drugmakers used traditional technology.
“Everyone should consider the benefits that mRNA vaccines can bring to humanity,” Gao said. “We have to follow it closely and not ignore it, because we already have different types of vaccines.”
mRNA
Gao had earlier raised questions about the safety of mRNA vaccines. He told the official Xinhua news agency in December that he could not rule out negative side effects as it was being used on healthy people for the first time.
Chinese state media and popular health and science blogs have also questioned the safety and efficacy of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which uses mRNA.
As of April 2, about 34 million people had received the two doses required by Chinese vaccinations, and about 65 million said according to Gao.
Experts believe that mixing vaccines, or sequential vaccination, can increase effectiveness. Trials around the world are looking at vaccine blending or after a longer period of time.
Researchers in Britain are studying a possible combination of the Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca vaccines.