[ad_1]
China’s top disease control official has admitted that the efficacy of the country’s coronavirus vaccines is low – and mixing them is among the strategies being considered to boost their effectiveness.
Gao Fu, the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said efficacy rates needed improving, in the rare admission.
Giving people doses of different vaccines is one way to improve vaccines that “don’t have very high rates of protection”, he said.
Live COVID updates from across the UK and around the world
Gao Fu at a press conference earlier this year
“Inoculation using vaccines of different technical lines is being considered,” he added, during a conference in the Chinese city of Chengdu.
China has been at the forefront of COVID-19 vaccine development.
It started vaccinating some citizens as far back as last summer under emergency use approval.
Five vaccines have been developed in China, four of which require two shots and a fifth which is only a single dose.
It includes one from privately owned company Sinovac, two from the state-owned Sinopharm, one developed as a partnership between Mr Gao’s team and Anhui Zhifei Longcom, and a single shot vaccine from a company called CanSino.
:: Subscribe to Into The Grey Zone podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Spreaker
The effectiveness of the vaccines range from as low as around 50% to 79%, based on what the companies have said.
Mr Gao later released a statement through the state-owned Global Times saying that he had been misunderstood and had in fact been talking about global vaccines in general.
No externally developed vaccines are authorised for use in the country.
Chile has received millions of doses of vaccines from China
A study released on Sunday on the Sinovac vaccine, when given shorter than three weeks apart, showed that the jab had a 49.1% efficacy in Phase III trials in Brazil, below the World Health Organisation’s threshold.
However, increasing the gap between jabs over three weeks boosted the efficacy to 62.3%.
A real-world study at the University of Chile suggested last week the vaccine was 54% effective in reducing infection.
Chile has used the Chinese vaccine on a large scale, vaccinating millions of people, although it is still in the grip of a spike of cases – seeing as many as 8,000 daily diagnoses in recent weeks.
The Chinese…
[ad_2]
Source link
