China began an ambitious effort to vaccinate 50 million people against the coronavirus before next month’s Lunar New Year, after the country recently approved its domestic vaccine COVID-19 for general use.
The program is prioritizing key groups of frontline workers, including workers in hospitals, utilities, deliveries, transportation and utilities, as well as people whose jobs require them to travel abroad. Millions of people in priority groups had already received injections of the vaccine before it was approved by regulators at the state pharmaceutical company Sinopharm as part of an “urgent use” effort, according to The Washington Post.
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China plans to administer the first dose of the vaccine to 50 million people before January 15 and the second dose by February 5, before the Lunar New Year festivities beginning on February 11. The holiday is considered the world’s largest annual human migration, as hundreds of millions of people in the country leave their cities to visit their family in more rural parts of the country.
Chinese authorities are under pressure to apply vaccines before the Lunar New Year race, after the holiday was interrupted last year, when Wuhan, China, was the epicenter of the outbreak. Last year, about 1.5 billion trips were made during the holiday, about half the normal number of trips, as people took shelter there during the outbreak, reports The Washington Post.
Local media reported On Monday, Beijing vaccinated 73,537 people at more than 200 vaccination sites in the first two days of the new year.
The vaccine was approved on December 31. Clinical studies have shown that the vaccine is almost 80% effective.
Meanwhile, in Israel, health officials are working to secure more doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, as the country has inoculated a larger proportion of its population than any other country and is under-supplied. Israel is administering doses to about 150,000 people a day and has reached 12 percent of its population with the first dose since December 20, The Washington Post reports.
This is at a time when officials responsible for the Trump administration’s Warp Speed operation recognized the US experienced a delay in placing the vaccine in the arms of Americans.
More than 13 million doses of COVID-19 have been distributed across the country, with more than 4.2 million people receiving the first dose on January 2, according to the CDC.
That figure is far below the Trump administration’s goal of administering the first dose to 20 million Americans before January 1.
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