Beijing deploys an inhaled anti-covid vaccine as it suffers its biggest wave of infections

In the midst of the worst wave of covid to hit Beijing since the start of the pandemic, the Chinese capital has begun to offer its inhabitants a new inhaled vaccine, the first of its kind approved in the world, according to the press from the asian power.

This is a drug that was given the green light in September for emergency use by the country's health authorities, and initially it can only be inoculated as a booster for those over 18 years of age.

In Shanghai it was already offered since the end of October, and it is also used in a handful of other cities.

In Beijing, where the number of infections has risen every day since the 20th Communist Party Congress concluded, and there are myriads of confined housing blocks, as well as schools, shops and restaurants in some districts closed off,

The vaccine is a kind of whitish nebula that floats inside a plastic cup with a suction cup.

The emanations of the anti-covid drug are inhaled through the mouth, until the mist disappears from the container, and one has to retain them in the lungs for five seconds for it to take effect.

"The taste is quite good," said a Beijinger in a recent report on state television CCTV.

“It has a bit of sweetness, a bit of fragrance, and it's not choking,” he added.

"It's like having a cup of milk," compared another recently vaccinated quoted by the Hong Kong newspaper

.

The drug has been developed by CanSino Biologics, a Chinese company based in Tianjin responsible for one of the coronavirus injections already used in the country, and its components are quite similar to this one, which uses an adenovirus from the common cold to introduce into the human cells coronavirus genetic information.

Baptized with the commercial name Convidencia Air, a preliminary study prepublished in

in January (but without full scientific review) suggests that this vaccine could be effective as a booster.

The previous CanSino serum has been approved for use in more than a dozen countries, including Hungary, Argentina, Mexico and Pakistan, according to the AP agency.

The inhaled vaccine will only be supplied to adults who have completed two injections of inactivated vaccines or one shot of CanSino's adenovirus vector-based vaccine, according to the official

newspaper .

Beijing is confident that its deployment will help reactivate the stagnant vaccination booster figures while the country has been involved in a new wave for weeks and is inexorably approaching its historic peak of infections, with more than 28,000 new cases reported this Tuesday.

Booster doses against covid have been offered in China since the second half of 2021, and to date some 890 million of these additional injections have been inoculated (around 63% of the population), according to official data from 10 days ago. .

But among those over 80, the most vulnerable population, only around 40% have received reinforcement.

In the European Union, to establish a point of comparison, 84.5% of those over 60 years of age have been protected with an additional dose.

Added to this is the fact that China does not offer its citizens any messenger RNA vaccines, considered more effective than their inactivated or adenovirus rivals.

A couple of weeks ago, during the controversial lightning visit of the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to Beijing, the European leader managed to get a timid commitment from the authorities to assess the approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for "expatriates" on Chinese soil. .

The German president assured that he was confident that it was only a first step towards a broader approval, although European diplomatic sources show their skepticism that this could happen.

China is one of the few countries in the world - and the only one among the great powers - that continues to adhere to a strict zero-covid strategy to curb the virus, which implies massive testing, the total or partial closure of cities as soon as they detect a few cases and a thorough technological tracking of positive cases and their contacts, typical of a science fiction movie.

The shadow of this cloud hangs over Beijing these days.

In the Chinese capital all the conversations revolve around the covid and its daily ravages.

The city already exceeds almost 1,400 daily cases, the highest number of infections recorded to date.

The megacity, with more than 21 million inhabitants, learned over the weekend the first three covid-related deaths in China for six months.

The last one had occurred on May 26 in Shanghai, when the financial metropolis was immersed in a wave and suffered a harsh confinement that lasted more than two months.

The three deceased over the weekend in Beijing, according to the Chinese press, were between 87 and 91 years old and all three suffered from previous pathologies.

"The city is facing the most complex and serious prevention and control situation since the outbreak of the coronavirus," Liu Xiaofeng, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said Monday in an appearance collected by Reuters.

The outbreak is concentrated in Chaoyang district, where about 3.5 million people live and numerous embassies and office complexes are based.

China seems to be walking through unknown lands in recent weeks, in a paradoxical mix between maintaining the so-called “dynamic” zero-COVID policy and progressive détente, which in Beijing they call “optimization”.

10 days ago, the Government approved, among other measures, the relaxation of quarantines for international travelers and close contacts of positive cases.

During the presentation of the battery of proposals, Chang Jile, deputy director of the National Office for Disease Control, stressed the need to "accelerate" immunization and reinforcement, especially among the elderly.

"They are the ones who need it the most," he said, and then called for them to get vaccinated and not pay attention to "rumors or incorrect information on the internet."

In this scheme that walks between the opening and the closing, it is unknown what role the recent tour abroad of the president, Xi Jinping, could play, after spending last week at the G-20 in Bali (Indonesia) and the summit the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum in Bangkok, Thailand, where he met with a long list of leaders from around the world.

At the last meeting was John Lee, head of the Hong Kong autonomous government, who on his return to the island on Sunday tested positive for coronavirus (he is isolated and in good health).

Two days earlier, Lee had been sitting next to Xi at the Bangkok summit, neither of them wearing masks.

The Chinese president has endured the bulk of the pandemic without leaving the country and has only been encouraged to leave in recent months.

This was his second trip to the outside world, after visiting Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in September, where he met his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

On this occasion he has been seen comfortable without a mask, even among the hubbub of leaders.

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