BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s COVID-19 vaccine production capacity may be sufficient for 40% of the population to be vaccinated in mid-2021, the country’s chief of disease control authorities said on Friday.
The country’s production capacity may also be large enough to allow 70% -80% of its 1.4 billion population to be vaccinated by the beginning of 2022, Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for the Control and Prevention of Diseases, he told reporters on the sidelines of the annual meeting of the government’s top advisory body.
“The possibility exists,” said Gao, but warned that translating production capacity into real products that meet the necessary standards was “a complicated process”.
He added that the estimate was his personal view as a scientist, not an official prediction.
More than 52 million doses were administered in China at the end of February, which equates to less than 4 doses per 100 people, a proportion much lower than the level seen in countries like Israel and the United States.
China, which has approved four locally developed vaccines for general public use, has not revealed how many doses it is actually preparing.
Sinovac Biotech said earlier this week that the company’s annual production capacity for the company’s two-dose CoronaVac vaccine could reach 2 billion doses by June.
A unit of the China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm), based in Wuhan, manages a facility that can produce up to 100 million doses of its vaccine per year, while a Beijing-based Sinopharm subsidiary has an annual capacity of 1 billion doses separate product. Both vaccines at Sinopharm units require two doses.
Sinopharm can expand the production capacity of the COVID-19 vaccine to 3 billion doses per year, said Yu Qingming, president of the Sinopharm Group, another Sinopharm unit that is not directly involved in the production of the COVID-19 vaccine, according to the state media.
Yu did not say when the 3 billion dose capacity would be reached.
CanSino Biologics’ single-dose vaccine production capacity could reach 500 million doses annually this year, said a scientist who leads research for the vaccine to state media in February.
Companies like Shenzhen Kangtai Biological Products and Walvax Biotechnology, whose vaccine candidates have yet to be approved, have started work at the manufacturing facilities.
(Reporting by Roxanne Liu and Ryan Woo; Editing by Alex Richardson)