China considers mixing COVID-19 vaccines to boost efficacy as cases surge worldwide

China’s top health official on April 10 said that the country is considering mixing coronavirus vaccines in a bid to further boost vaccine efficacy. While speaking at a news conference, China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for the first time, publically expressed concerns over the effectiveness of Chinese jabs and said that the currently available vaccines “don’t have very high rates of protection”. Gao Fu, the director of the Chinese CDC, did not specify whether he was referring to foreign or domestic vaccines, however, he said that “inoculation using vaccines of different technical lines are being considered”. 

According to the Global Times, Gao said that taking steps to “optimise” the vaccine process including changing the number of doses and the length of time between doses was a “definite” solution to efficacy issues. It is worth mentioning that the available data shows that the Chinese vaccines lag others including Pfizer and Moderna in terms of efficacy but require less stringent temperature controls during shortage. Gao also noted that the global vaccine protection rate test data are both high and low. 

However, he said that how to improve the protection rate of vaccines is a problem that requires global scientists. Gao said that mixing vaccines and adjusting immunisation methods are solutions that he had proposed. Further, the top Chines health official rejected claims by some media reports that he said Chinese COVID-19 vaccines have a low protection rate. 

China’s coronavirus vaccines 

China has developed four vaccines approved for public use. The country will likely also produce three billion doses by the end of the year. The COVID-19 vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac was found to have an efficacy rate of slightly above 50 per cent in the Brazilian clinical trials. A separate study in Turkey, on the other hand, said that it was 83.5 per cent effective. 

No detailed efficacy data has been released on the vaccine developed by China’s Sinopharm. But based on interim results, the two vaccines developed by its units are 79.4 per cent and 72.5 effective respectively. Back in March, a WHO panel had also said that both the Chinese vaccine makers have presented data on their COVID-19 vaccines indicating levels of efficacy in line with those required by the World Health Organization. 

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