At a time when the active Covid-19 cases in India breached the 11 lakh-mark for the first time after a record high of 1.52 lakh new infections while a massive vaccination push, dubbed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the beginning of another major war against coronavirus, was launched on Sunday in a bid to abate the surge, in a rare admission of the weakness of Chinese coronavirus vaccines, the country’s top disease control official said their effectiveness is low and the government is considering mixing them to give them 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 in the southwestern city of Chengdu. Beijing has distributed hundreds of millions of doses in other countries while also trying to promote doubt about the effectiveness of Western vaccines. It’s now under formal consideration whether we should use different vaccines from different technical lines for the immunization process, Gao said.
The effectiveness rate of a coronavirus vaccine from Sinovac, a Chinese developer, at preventing symptomatic infections has been found to be as low as 50.4 per cent by researchers in Brazil. By comparison, the vaccine made by Pfizer has been found to be 97 per cent effective.
Beijing has yet to approve any foreign vaccines for use in China, where the coronavirus emerged in late 2019. Gao gave no details of possible changes in strategy but mentioned mRNA, a previously experimental technique used by Western vaccine developers while China’s drug makers used traditional technology.
Coming to India, while the cumulative number of Covid-19 vaccine doses administered in the country has crossed 10 crore after 85 days, the ‘Tika Utsav’ or a special ‘vaccination festival’ was started till 14 April.
“Anyone eligible for the vaccine should get the jab, and for this the society and administration have to make full efforts,” Prime Minister Modi said pitching for
‘zero vaccine waste’ and urging the people to follow Covid-appropriate behaviour.
“This festival is, in a way, the beginning of another major war against corona. We have to lay special emphasis on personal hygiene as well as social hygiene,” he said. It is to be noted that India has already emerged as the vaccine supplier for the whole world.