Official: Chinese vaccines’ efficacy low

BEIJING – In a rare admission of the weakness of Chinese coronavirus vaccines, the country’s top disease control official says their effectiveness is low and the government is considering mixing them to get a boost.

Chinese vaccines “don’t have very high protection rates,” said the director of the China Centers for Disease Control, Gao Fu, at a conference Saturday in the southwestern city of Chengdu.

Beijing has distributed hundreds of millions of doses abroad while trying to promote doubt about the effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine made using the previously experimental messenger RNA process.

“It’s now under formal consideration whether we should use different vaccines from different technical lines,” Gao said.

Officials didn’t respond directly Sunday to questions about Gao’s comment or possible changes. But another official said developers are working on mRNA-based vaccines.

“The mRNA vaccines developed in our country have also entered the clinical trial stage,” said Wang Huaqing, who gave no timeline for use.

Experts say mixing vaccines, or sequential immunization, might boost effectiveness. Researchers in Britain are studying a combination of PfizerBioNTech and AstraZeneca vaccines.

Vaccines made by Sinovac, a private company, and Sinopharm, a stateowned firm, made up the majority of Chinese vaccines sent to countries including Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, Hungary, Brazil and Turkey.