China pledges 2 billion shots for U.N. effort
A pledge by China to supply 2 billion doses of COVID19 vaccines to other countries this year expands the commitments made by a nation that is already the largest exporter of the shots by far.
President Xi Jinping also promised to donate $100 million to COVAX, the program that aims to distribute vaccines to low and middleincome countries.
China has already delivered 770 million doses to foreign countries since September last year, Wang Xiaolong, director general of the Foreign Ministry’s Department of International Economic Affairs, said Friday. Most of those have been exported under bilateral deals.
The U.S. has donated 110 million doses, mostly through COVAX, the White House said earlier this week.
China’s two biggest COVID vaccine makers, Sinopharm and Sinovac, have entered agreements to deliver up to 550 million doses through COVAX by the middle of next year. Wang said the first deliveries under the U.N.backed program will be made this month to Bangladesh, Pakistan and Algeria.
Hundreds of millions of Chinese shots have been administered to people both in China and around the world. However, there are concerns about whether they protect adequately against the highly transmissible delta variant.
In Indonesia and Thailand, the governments are planning to give a booster shot of the Moderna vaccine to health workers after reports that some had died despite being fully vaccinated with the Chinese shot.