BEIJING (Reuters) – China has accelerated its vaccinations against COVID-19, administering 10 million doses in about a week, and is considering various visa policies based on vaccination and virus conditions in different countries, they said on Sunday. officials.
The country had administered 74.96 million doses of vaccine as of Saturday, health commission spokesman Mi Feng said. This exceeded 64.98 million on March 14.
China plans to vaccinate 40 percent of its 1.4 billion people by mid-year, according to state media and a health adviser. China was one of the first countries to start administering vaccines last year and has exported millions of doses, but its vaccination rate has fallen behind those in countries such as Israel and the United States.
More than 70 million doses of Sinovac Biotech’s shot have been administered globally, a company spokesman told a news conference, without specifying how many of these had been administered in China.
Beijing is considering differentiated policies for issuing visas, flights and controls on the number of people arriving in China according to the progress of vaccination and COVID-19 situations in different countries.
“At the moment we do not exempt vaccinated people from isolation tests and measures,” said Feng Zijian, deputy director of the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC).
But he said China will pay attention to international progress in developing “vaccine passports” and could adjust the virus reduction measures after the national population reaches a high level of vaccination.
China’s full-year vaccine production can fully meet the needs of the whole country, said Mao Junfeng, an official in the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
He said the supply of materials for vaccine production, including glass vials and syringes, is “relatively stable.”
Countries with high proportions of older people should be prioritized for vaccination, said Wu Zunyou, China CDC’s chief epidemiologist.
If all countries move forward with their vaccination programs at the same rate, it is possible that each country can achieve only 10% or 30% immunity, not enough to protect the population, Wu told the Development Forum China in Beijing on Saturday evening.
“We need to reach 70% -80% in one country as soon as possible, then a second country and then a third country,” Wu said.
China has approved four locally developed vaccines for general public use by Sinovac, CanSino Biologics and two units of the China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm).
Last week, a fifth vaccine developed by the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences was approved.
Report by Roxanne Liu and Ryan Woo; Edited by William Mallard and Sam Holmes