BEIJING (AP) – In China, the problem does not seem to be a lack of vaccine. Instead, with the outbreak of COVID-19 largely under control at home, few people want to be vaccinated.
Chinese health officials appealed to the public on Sunday to be vaccinated. They also said that since vaccination is not a guarantee against infection, they still require anyone who arrives in China to be quarantined for 14 days, even if they have received a vaccine.
“China will continue with the current preventive control measures to prevent imported cases and domestic case recovery,” said Feng Zijian, deputy director general of the China Disease Control and Prevention Center, at a news conference.
As of Saturday, nearly 75 million doses of vaccine have been given, said the country’s National Health Commission. The number of people vaccinated would be less, as some people gave two injections.
China, with 1.4 billion people, has a much lower vaccination rate than many other countries.
“Many people mistakenly think that there is no practical meaning to being vaccinated because the epidemic situation is under effective control and the virus is far from us,” He Qinghua, an official with the National Health Commission, said at the same news conference.
He warned that no one is immune to the disease and that, with the pandemic still ravaging other parts of the world, imported cases could trigger new outbreaks in China.
Chinese officials want to vaccinate enough people to obtain collective immunity. Since the outbreak was not widespread in China, a relatively small proportion of the population has acquired immunity through previous infections, He said. Mainland China reported 90,099 cases during the pandemic.
“Now that we have vaccines, we must allow more people to obtain immunity and protection through inoculation,” he said. “I suggest again that people be vaccinated as soon as possible to acquire immunity.”
The relatively low rate of vaccination in China was one of the reasons cited by Feng for maintaining the current measures for foreign arrivals. He also noted concerns about the effectiveness of vaccines against new variants of the virus.
China itself had an infected vaccinated person, its only recent case of domestic spread of the coronavirus.
The person works in a virus testing laboratory at a hospital in the city of Xi’an and received the second vaccine injected in early February, according to Chinese media reports. They did not say which vaccine the person had.
China went 31 days without a local case until it was reported on Thursday. This has raised concerns in China about domestic vaccines.
Wang Huaqing, an immunization specialist at the CDC in China, said the vaccines have failed to prevent infection in a small number of cases. He said the recent case is being studied to try to determine why the vaccine failed.
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Associated Press video production company Olivia Zhang contributed to this report.