One million doses of the Chinese Sinovac Covid-19 vaccine will arrive in Hong Kong on Friday afternoon and vaccinations will begin there a week later, according to a city official.
The inoculation of priority groups with doses of Sinovac is scheduled to begin on February 26, said Hong Kong Public Service Secretary Patrick Nip.
The city is easing restrictions on social distance starting today, after reporting its lowest daily number of new Covid-19 cases since late November at the beginning of the week.
Hong Kong registered eight new cases since Monday, of which six were transmitted locally. In total, the city of more than seven million people recorded 10,812 Covid infections and 197 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University count.
In January, it was revealed that Sinovac had an efficacy rate of only 50.38% in final-stage tests in Brazil – significantly lower than previous results showed. That rate barely exceeds the 50% effectiveness limit set by the World Health Organization, and well below the 78% previously announced with great fanfare in China earlier this month.
The Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines were considered candidate vaccines to be potentially accessible and easily distributed. Unlike Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, Chinese vaccines do not require expensive cold storage.
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