BEIJING (Reuters) – China, which has accelerated efforts to vaccinate its population against COVID-19, administered about 65 million doses by Sunday, an official at the National Health Commission of China said at a news conference on Monday .
While China was one of the first countries to start administering vaccines last year and has been exporting millions of doses of its domestically developed vaccines to other countries, the vaccination rate of its own population has lagged behind countries like Israel and the United States.
China has approved four internally developed vaccines.
The country’s capital, Beijing, gave 10 million doses, and more than 3 million people received two doses, the official Beijing Daily newspaper said on Sunday.
The country plans to inoculate 40% of its 1.4 billion inhabitants by the end of June, according to state media, a target that will require China to administer about 4 million doses per day on average – a significant acceleration in the rate of less than 1 million a day since the beginning of March.
“Chinese vaccine manufacturers are still expanding, and with the continued release of production capacity, production will gradually increase,” said Tian Yulong, an official at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
He did not disclose China’s vaccine production rate or supply levels when questioned by Reuters.
(Reporting by Roxanne Liu and Martin Pollard; Editing by Tom Hogue and Shri Navaratnam)