China’s official media say the country has surpassed the 1 billion dose mark for domestic vaccinations against the new crown. However, China’s vaccine diplomacy is being resisted overseas, with outsiders particularly concerned about the lack of effectiveness of the Chinese vaccine against current mutant strains of the virus.
China’s official People’s Daily newspaper reported that China had exceeded 1 billion doses of the new crown vaccine as of June 19. The report said China plans to complete at least 70 percent of its target population vaccination target by the end of this year.
Shao Yiming, a researcher at the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, was quoted on the People’s Daily official microblogging site as saying that China needs to get the vaccination rate to 80 to 85 percent, “or a little more than 1 billion people,” to reach its herd immunization target.
However, China’s vaccine diplomacy is meeting increasing resistance overseas amid the increased ability of the new coronavirus mutant strain to spread.
Bloomberg reported that the death toll in Brazil’s neo-coronavirus outbreak had exceeded 500,000 as of Saturday (June 19), but many Brazilians prefer to wait in line for the Pfizer vaccine rather than get a mainstream vaccine for the Brazilian market such as the Chinese Kexing vaccine.
The Kexing vaccine is far less effective than other vaccines, and some Brazilians are skeptical of the vaccine because of its Chinese background, the report said. Acceptance of another vaccine on the Brazilian market – the British Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine – has also begun to decline in Brazil because of rumors of rare incidents causing blood clots.
In Indonesia, health officials said last Thursday that more than 350 doctors and health workers still contracted New Crown after receiving the Chinese Kexing vaccine, with dozens of them requiring hospitalization, deepening concerns about the Chinese vaccine’s ability to fight the now more transmissible Delta variant strain of the virus.
Costa Rican officials said last Wednesday that after evaluating reports from clinical studies of the Chinese Coxin vaccine, they concluded that it was not effective enough to prevent infection with the new strain of Coronavirus and decided not to adopt it at this time. The Washington Post reported that Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates recently began giving Pfizer vaccine boosters to people who had already received the Chinese national vaccine.
Chinese official media said that China’s existing vaccine still offers “considerable protection” against the mutated virus, but did not give specific data.
Recent Comments