BEIJING (Reuters) – China has stepped up its vaccinations against COVID-19, administering 10 million doses in about a week, and is considering varying visa policies based on vaccination and virus conditions in different countries, officials said on Sunday. .
The country administered 74.96 million doses of vaccine until Saturday, health commission spokesman Mi Feng said at a news conference. That is up from 64.98 million on March 14.
China plans to vaccinate 40% of its 1.4 billion inhabitants by the middle of the year, according to state media and a leading health advisor. China was one of the first countries to start administering vaccines last year and has exported millions of doses, but its vaccination rate is behind countries like Israel and the United States.
More than 70 million doses of Sinovac Biotech’s injection were administered globally, a company spokesman told a news conference, without specifying how many of them were administered in China.
Beijing is considering different policies for issuing visas, flights and controls on the number of people arriving in China based on the progress of vaccination and the situations of COVID-19 in different countries.
“We do not exempt vaccinated people from testing and isolation measures for now,” said Feng Zijian, deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC).
But he said that China will pay attention to international progress in the development of “vaccine passports” and can adjust virus containment measures after the domestic population has reached a high level of immunization.
China’s annual vaccine production can fully meet the needs of the entire country, said the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology official, Mao Junfeng.
He said that the supply of materials for the production of vaccines, including glass vials and syringes, is “relatively stable”.
Countries with a high proportion of elderly people should be prioritized for vaccination, said Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the China CDC.
If all countries move forward with their vaccination programs at the same rate, it is possible that each country will achieve only 10% or 30% immunity, which is not enough to protect the population, explained Wu at the China Development Forum in Beijing on Saturday night.
“We need to reach 70% -80% in one country as soon as possible, then in a second country and then in a third,” said Wu.
China has approved four vaccines developed locally for general public use by Sinovac, CanSino Biologics and two units of the China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm).
A fifth vaccine developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Microbiology was approved for emergency use last week.
Reporting by Roxanne Liu and Ryan Woo; Edition by William Mallard and Sam Holmes