China considers coalescing COVID-19 vaccines to boost effectiveness

China's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Gao Fu told a news conference that the rate of protection currently available for vaccines is not very high.

He said that consideration was being given to combining different vaccines however changing the number of vaccine doses and the duration of administering the jab is a good solution to the problem of efficacy.

China has approved the use of four locally manufactured COVID vaccines, and on April 10, a senior official said that the country wants to produce 3 billion doses by the end of this year.

A COVID-19 vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac was found to have an efficacy rate of slightly above 50% in Brazilian clinical trials. A separate study in Turkey said it was 83.5% effective.

China’s Sinopharm has developed vaccines whose effectiveness was reported to be 79.4% and 72.5%, respectively, in the provisional results.

A WHO panel said in March that the two Chinese companies had submitted data of their vaccines and that their usefulness was in line with WHO standards.

China has shipped millions of its vaccines abroad, and officials and state media have fiercely defended the shots while calling into question the safety and logistics capabilities of other vaccines.

“The global vaccine protection rate test data are both high and low,” Gao told on Sunday.

“How to improve the protection rate of vaccines is a problem that requires global scientists to consider,” Gao said, adding that mixing vaccines and adjusting immunisation methods are solutions that he had proposed.