China pushes ahead with aggressive vaccination effort after slow start

China has fully mobilized its COVID-19 vaccination efforts after overcoming a series of hurdles, with 100 million shots administered in five days last month.

As of Wednesday, China administered more than 700 million doses, with half of those doses given in May alone. The number represents about a third of shots distributed globally.

China received emergency approval from the World Health Organization (WHO) for its Sinopharm vaccine on May 7 – making it just one of six vaccines at the organization’s disposal – but health officials had previously admitted that the vaccines developed by China were not highly effective.

“It’s now under formal consideration whether we should use different vaccines from different technical lines for the immunization process,” China Centers for Disease Control director Gao Fu said at a conference in April.

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Initial reports claimed that the Sinopharm vaccine had a 79% efficacy, but foreign trials of another Chinese vaccine, the Sinovac vaccine, found efficacy would be as low as a 50% rate.

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