Bloomberg reports that China is building hospitals, testing people for the virus, and sealing cities quickly to stop the New coronavirus outbreak, but in terms of vaccination, China has been promoting the vaccine for nearly seven weeks, and the people are not being vaccinated as much as expected. The reason for the slower pace of vaccination in China compared to Western countries is related to the Chinese people questioning the safety and efficacy of the vaccine.
According to Bloomberg’s Vaccine Tracker, China officially began vaccinating its people on Dec. 15, 2020, and has so far administered more than 31.2 million doses of vaccines to its people, second only to the 35 million doses administered in the United States. However, with a population of nearly 1.4 billion, China’s vaccination rate is equivalent to only 2 doses per 100 people, which is not as high as Europe’s 3 doses per 100 people, the United States’ 10 doses per 100 people and far less than Israel’s 60 doses per 100 people.
China’s vaccine popularity is slow, according to the report, because people generally doubt the safety and protective power of domestic vaccines, and people think it is not forced to cut, after all, the Epidemic is more serious in northern China.
The report said China’s vaccination rate seems to have fallen short of its internal goal of administering vaccines to 50 million people before New Year’s Eve on Feb. 11, the Lunar New Year, and whether China, the world’s No. 2 economy, will continue to be blocked when other countries are beginning to unblock the herd immunity brought about by vaccines.
Huang Yanzhong, director of the Center for Global health Studies at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, said in an interview with Bloomberg, “As long as the government is willing to implement it through top-to-bottom mobilization, as it has done in the past, we’ll be able to get the vaccine to work. We were expecting China to be successful in implementing (vaccination). Now it seems that we were too optimistic.”
The report also mentions that the number of people vaccinated in China is increasing slowly, and is not as impeded or under-produced as in Europe, where there are more than 25,000 vaccination sites throughout the country, including renovated stadiums, museums and community centers. By mid-2020, some people will already have been vaccinated under emergency use authorizations.
The report said that vaccines made by China’s Kexing Biotech and China Biotechnology, a subsidiary of Sinopharm, can be stored at refrigerator temperatures for more than a year, unlike vaccines made in the United States using messaging ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology, which need to be frozen at extremely low temperatures.
Louis Kuijs, a scholar of Asian economics at Oxford Economics in Hong Kong, argued in an interview that “if the pace of vaccination does not accelerate, it could further delay China’s open borders and affect economic growth in the coming years. “
Bloomberg projects that at China’s current rate of vaccination, it will take another five and a half years for China to reach herd immunity, longer than the 11 months in the United States and the six months in the United Kingdom. The situation could pose a problem for countries and companies that need China to lift the embargo, as China still has more than 1 million International Students abroad and is one of the world’s important consumer markets, and the current situation is not favorable to China’s economic outlook.
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