Top China exec: Vaccines have low efficacy.
Current vaccines offer low protection against the coronavirus and mixing them is among strategies being considered to boost their effectiveness, China’s top disease control official has admitted in a rare acknowledgment.
China has distributed hundreds of millions of doses of domestically made vaccines abroad and is relying on them for its own mass immunization campaign.
Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention director Gao Fu, however, said at a conference last Saturday their efficacy rates needed improvement.
“We will solve the issue that current vaccines don’t have very high protection rates,” Gao said in a presentation on Chinese COVID-19 vaccines and immunization strategies at a conference in the southwestern city of Chengdu.
“It’s now under consideration whether we should use different vaccines from different technical lines for the immunization process,” he added.
The Chinese official also praised the benefits of messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines – the technology behind the two vaccines seen as the most effective, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna – months after questioning whether the then-unproven method was safe.
In a message to The Associated Press, Gao said late Sunday night he was speaking about the effectiveness rates for “vaccines in the world, not particularly for China.”
He did not respond to further questions about which vaccines he was referring to.
Gao directed the AP to an interview he did with the state-owned Global Times, which has published several articles raising doubts about the safety of Pfizer ’s mRNA vaccine. He was quoted by the outlet last Sunday as saying he was misunderstood and merely talking in general terms about improving vaccine efficacy.
Beijing had earlier tried to promote doubt about the effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which uses the genetic code mRNA to prime the immune system.
Health officials at a news conference last Sunday did not respond directly to questions about Gao’s comment or about possible changes in official plans.