Time.news – The China he admitted for the first time the ineffectiveness of his own vaccines against the Covid-19: “They don’t have a very high protection rate,” said Gao Fu, head of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention of China, speaking at a news conference yesterday from Chengdu. As the Associated Press reports, Gao announced that Chinese authorities are considering mixing the different vaccines to enhance them and urged the benefits of Western mRNA serums, which China does not manufacture, to be considered.
Up to now, the use of any foreign vaccine has not been authorized in the People’s Republic. Beijing has distributed hundreds of millions of doses to other countries. “We are now officially considering whether we should use different vaccines for the immunization process,” said Gao.
The efficacy rate of the Sinovac vaccine in preventing symptomatic infections from Covid-19 stands at 50.4% according to clinical trials carried out in Brazil. Two other vaccines from China’s Sinopharm show efficacy of 79.3 and 72.5%, while the figure for the vaccine of the biopharmaceutical giant CanSino is 65%. For comparison, Pfizer / BionTech serum is 97% effective.
The head of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention of China did not provide details on the possible change of strategy, but called for “considering the benefits that mRNA vaccines can bring to humanity”. “We shouldn’t ignore them just because we already have several vaccines,” he added.
Gao had previously raised concerns about the safety of mRNA vaccines. In December, quoted by the Xinhua agency, he said he could not rule out negative side effects of this experimental type of vaccine, used on humans for the first time.
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