China is heavily promoting and delivering vaccines to a number of developing countries in an attempt to lead the global vaccine market, while also hoping to demonstrate China’s generosity and strength in the health sector, but China appears to be failing to do so.
Some studies and reports on Chinese vaccines claim that the vaccines are less effective than products from Western pharmaceutical manufacturers. And the lack of transparency in the data on Chinese vaccines has raised questions.
Officials in Brazil and other countries have also complained that China has been slow to act on vaccine shipments.
“China is still developing procedures, which will take Time,” and “supplies are also relatively short,” the Brazilian source was quoted by Reuters as saying, adding that Brazil is not the only country facing obstacles to Chinese vaccine exports.
The New York Times reported that some lawmakers in the Philippines have criticized the government’s decision to buy the new coronavirus vaccine produced by China’s Kexing Biologicals. Malaysia and Singapore also ordered the vaccine from Kexing, but both governments had to assure their citizens that they would only approve the vaccine if it was proven to be safe and effective.
Bilahari Kausikan, a former veteran Singaporean diplomat, was quoted as saying, “Right now, I would not get any Chinese vaccine because there is not enough data.”
China has sent millions of doses of the new crown vaccine to several countries. In addition, China has signed vaccine production agreements with several countries so that it can help those countries produce their own vaccines by exporting raw vaccine materials. But the New York Times reports that the ineffectiveness and slow movement of Chinese vaccines means it may take longer for these countries to eradicate the virus.
China is stepping up its efforts to provide vaccines to some developing countries while reporting that vaccines produced in the United States and other Western countries are unsafe.
China Global Television Network (CGTN) anchor Liu Xin had tweeted, “I can’t independently confirm, but the news is disturbing: 10 people have died in Germany days after being injected with the BionTech/Pfizer vaccine.”
For its part, the official media Xinhua News Agency reported the news that 23 elderly deaths associated with Pfizer’s mRNA New Crown vaccine in the United States had been found in Norway.
Gao Fu, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the CDC, has also questioned the safety of the U.S. vaccine. He said it was “the first time people have given mRNA vaccines to healthy people, so there is a safety issue behind it.”
China’s Global Times, for its part, said in a report that Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine was a hastily developed product, and quoted Yang Zhanqiu, a professor at the Institute of Virus Research at Wuhan University’s Faculty of Medicine, as saying, “Compared to the Pfizer vaccine, the domestic vaccine is now mainly inactivated and has a much better safety profile.”
An international survey sponsored by polling firm YouGov showed that people around the world generally expressed willingness to receive the new crown vaccine, but most preferred vaccines developed in the United States or Germany and were skeptical of those made in China and Russia.
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