CDC Director Gao Fu makes a rare admission that China’s 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine has shortcomings, saying the Chinese vaccine has low efficacy and saying the government is considering mixing vaccines to boost effectiveness.
Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, made a rare admission that China’s COVID-19 vaccine has shortcomings and confessed to low efficacy. Gao Fu was speaking at a conference in Chengdu yesterday when he said the protective power of the Chinese vaccine was not very high, adding that they are now officially considering whether they should vaccinate with a different technical line of vaccine.
Gough did not specify details of the possible change in strategy, but he mentioned messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) gene technology during the meeting, according to the Central News Agency, citing AP sources. Western vaccine developers already use this experimental technology, while Chinese pharmaceutical manufacturers use traditional techniques.
Gough said at the conference that we should all think about the benefits that mRNA vaccines can bring to humans and pay serious attention to them, and not ignore them just because there are already multiple vaccines.
Gao has questioned the safety of mRNA vaccines in the past. Xinhua News Agency quoted Gao as saying last December that he could not rule out negative side effects because the mRNA vaccine was used for the first time on healthy people. Brazilian researchers have previously found that Sinovac Biotech’s coronavirus vaccine had only 50.4% protection against symptomatic infections. In contrast, the U.S. vaccine from Pfizer, which uses mRNA technology, had 97 percent protection.
The report said Beijing has distributed hundreds of millions of vaccines to other countries and has tried to promote the effectiveness of Western vaccines as negotiable. Chinese state-run media, public health and scientific blogs have questioned the safety and efficacy of Pfizer vaccines.
Beijing has so far not approved any foreign vaccines for use within China.
According to Gao Fu, as of April 2, about 34 million people in China had received two doses of the domestic vaccine and about 65 million had received one dose.
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