China falls behind West in vaccinations
China’s focus on exporting vaccine doses – partly because of their effectiveness as diplomatic currency – could prevent it from achieving herd immunity this year, leaving the country in a more drawn-out battle against virus flare-ups.
According to official forecasts, China will produce just about enough doses by the end of the year to cover 70 per cent of its 1.4 billion people. But this would require keeping nearly all its projected 2 billion doses at home. China has instead shipped millions of doses to developing nations, and pledged hundreds of millions more.
Zhang Yuntao, a senior executive at Sinopharm, one of China’s two major vaccine makers, said it would probably take ‘‘a year or two’’ to vaccinate 500 million people domestically. That would be only 36 per cent of the population.
Officials have declined to say when China will reach herd immunity, and what proportion of its vaccine doses will be sold abroad.
Hundreds of thousands of Chinese had received vaccinations by last September, while the rollout did not begin in the United States and Britain until
December. Since then, however, China has slipped behind the US, Britain and much of Europe in terms of shots per 100 people, because of its massive population and its overseas vaccine shipments.
Its target of vaccinating 50 million essential workers by mid-February would cover less than 4 per cent of its population. By that time, Britain aims to get at least a first dose to 15 million people, or about 22 per cent of its population.
Meanwhile, Chinese officials are battening down the hatches against new outbreaks. Tens of millions of people are under renewed lockdown, more invasive testing has been introduced, and the quarantine period for travellers has extended from 14 to 21 days.
As of Thursday, about 23 million people in China had received doses, according to the National Health Commission.
Compounding China’s challenge is the lower efficacy of its vaccines. The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines have efficacy rates of about 95 per cent, while Sinopharm’s is 79 per cent, and Sinovac’s was barely above 50 per cent in its largest clinical trial, in Brazil. This means that a larger proportion of the population will need to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity.