A senior Chinese health official announced that his country was considering injecting vaccines of different types against Covid-19, in order to strengthen the effectiveness of the current vaccines which he acknowledged that the effectiveness was "
not very high
".
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Available data shows that Chinese vaccines lag behind others, including those from Pfizer and Moderna, in terms of efficacy, even though they require less stringent temperature conditions for storage.
The currently available vaccines "
do not have a very high level of protection
," admitted this Saturday Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at a conference in the Chinese city of Chengdu.
"
Inoculation using vaccines from several technical lines is being considered,
" he said.
Gao said that take measures to "
optimize
The vaccination process, including changing the number of doses and the time between doses, was a solution to the efficacy issues.
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Lack of data
China has developed four vaccines approved for public use.
A Chinese official said on Saturday that the country would likely produce 3 billion doses by the end of the year.
A vaccine developed by Chinese Sinovac has been shown to have an efficacy rate of just over 50% in Brazilian clinical trials.
A separate study in Turkey said it was 83.5% effective.
No detailed efficacy data has been published on the two vaccines manufactured by Chinese Sinopharm.
The group said they would be 79.4% and 72.5% effective, respectively, based on intermediate results.
The two vaccine makers presented data on their Covid-19 vaccines in line with levels required by the World Health Organization, a WHO expert panel said in March.
China has so far shipped millions of doses of its vaccines overseas, and officials and state media have fiercely defended them.
