The number of COVID-19 strokes administered in China has exceeded one billion, health officials said on Sunday, more than a third of the doses administered worldwide.
The announcement by the National Health Commission comes after the number of shots fired worldwide exceeded 2.5 billion on Friday, according to a count of official AFP sources.
It is unclear what percentage of the Chinese population has been inoculated now, but their vaccine began slowly after a successful fight against the virus left little sense of urgency to be stung.
Lack of transparency and previous vaccine scandals have also sparked resistance among residents.
Authorities have set an ambitious goal of completely vaccinating 40 percent of the country’s nearly 1.4 billion people by the end of this month.
Some provinces offer vaccines for free to encourage people to roll up their sleeves. Residents of central Anhui Province have received free eggs, while some residents of Beijing have received shopping coupons.
A recent outbreak of the most contagious Delta variant of the virus in the southern city of Guangzhou has also served as an alarm clock for many who crawl their feet.
China reported 23 new coronavirus cases on Sunday.
The country has four conditionally approved vaccines, the published efficacy rates of which remain behind rival blows from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which have 95% and 94% success rates respectively.
Sinovac, of China, said earlier that trials of his shot in Brazil showed about 50 percent effectiveness in preventing infections and 80 percent in preventing cases that require medical intervention.
Both Sinopharm vaccines have efficacy rates of 79% and 72%, respectively, while the overall efficacy of CanSino is 65% after 28 days.
Many of them require two doses.
China is expected to produce more than three billion doses of vaccine this year, state news agency Xinhua reported in April.
Health authorities have not said when China will achieve herd immunity or what proportion vaccine doses will be sold abroad.
© 2021 AFP
Citation: China’s vaccine doses exceed one billion (2021, June 20) recovered on June 20, 2021 at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06-china-vaccine-doses-billion.html
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