Chinese vaccines do work. It's bad reporting that says it doesn't. In those countries they did not reach the percentage needed for herd immunity with less effective vaccines.
They were still hugely protective against severe disease. So they work.
Do they even have usable vaccines? Their Sinovac/Sinopharm vaccines were reasonably effective in preventing severe COVID in the non-elderly pre-omicron, but they don't seem to be too effective against omicron.
Most countries using the Chinese vaccines had the "benefit" of having a ton of natural immunity as well. China obviously does not have this. They might seriously have to consider importing Western vaccines as boosters, especially for their under-vaccinated elderly population.
Most people in China have received a vaccine (2 doses). It will be one of the locally developed ones, which are significantly less effective than Western ones but they do provide some protection (not that much, though, it seems but they claim that it does help reduce worst outcomes significantly).
Data out of Turkey, Brazil etc where Chinese vaccines were widely deployed with less lockdowns/restrictions do suggest lower efficacy at both reducing hospitalization and death. That said they are still fairly effective, just apparently not effective enough that China is willing to activate the floodgates. Also they have low vaccine penetration among the elderly which are hesitant to take vaccines in general
Another part of the problem is that China forbids Chinese citizens from getting foreign made vaccines. They’ve acquired them, but only allow foreigners to get them.
The "Chinese vaccine don't work" talking point is a bad faith myth created by western mainstream media, which misrepresented this study by comparing single- or two-dose Sinovac with 3-dose Pfizer. This sort of misrepresentation is unfortunately common practice in mainstream western media.
What is true however is that Chinese population has less immunity against omicron due to lower vaccination rates, especially among the elderly. For one, the Chinese don't see vaccination as really necessary because lockdowns work. Second, the Chinese worry a lot more about vaccine side effects. Here in the Netherlands, vaccines are sold as "100% safe, everyone should get it", whereas in China doctors would recommend against getting a vaccine if you have another medical problem such as heart problems. My other grandparents in law choose not to get vaccinated because they have many other health problems due to old age.
Finally, the Chinese public is by and large very supportive of lockdowns despite the Shanghai mess. Rather than "don't lock down" they now just believe "lock down earlier, don't turn into the next Shanghai".
What I don't get is, China has more than enough money to buy a vaccine that is more effective, and more than enough research capability to develop something against omicron if it's that bad there. Why don't they?
(Also, why didn't we scale the vaccines with the confidence we had, instead of waiting months doing nothing just because the complete results weren't available?)
Which raises an interesting question. In China they could make elderly get vaccinated. They close entire large apartment buildings with one person'a exposure to covid, bring them food occasionally and organize security and testing for those people. Why not go through and get everyone vaccinated? They are already monitoring their lives closely with Orwellian surveillance, why not just add on required shots on top of all that hell? I haven't seen that China disputes the usefulness of covid vaccines.
The chinese vaccines are mostly inactivated coronavirus vaccines and are only 50-60% effective. We are seeing countries which relied heavily on them such as Chile and the Seychelles having large and sustained outbreaks because they aren't effective enough to stop the spread. They probably do fairly well against mortality though.
I'd say we would be in an incredibly worse position if we only had J&J and Astrazeneca in the west. In the US the pandemic is over now and we have only vaccinated about half of people with the mRNA shots. I strongly doubt we would be normal again now if we had not had those.
Ironic that their research aimed at giving them a head start on vaccine development, and yet China’s covid vaccine ended up being garbage compared to the American and European ones.
> On the flip side their covid vaccine has also being a failure.
I think this is the bigger one -- studies indicate it's not nearly as effective as the western (mRNA) Covid shots, but China refuses to use the western shots. If they open the floodgates and (to absolutely no one's surprise) death rates spike, it proves that the Chinese shot was indeed mostly useless.
This is what China did and it seemed to work pretty well.
Though given how hush hush China is about everything, it's also possible they've had a vaccine they've been using on their population for a while and just deigned not to tell or share.
> I would love to see some peer reviewed papers about vaccination efficiency of Chinese vs. European vs. American vs. Russian vs. Cuban vaccines
The recent Hong Kong outbreak allowed a direct head-to-head comparison of Sinovac and BioNTech/Pfizer. The results were a bit surprising: 3 doses of Sinovac were just as effective as 3 doses of BioNTech.[0] This study only looked at Omicron (nothing that is circulating in HK), and only these two vaccines. China has other vaccines using different technologies as well (CanSino uses an adenovirus vector,[1] Angui Zhifei Longcom uses protein subunits [2]). There are studies about the various vaccines, generally conducted outside China.
> Just like with infection numbers, which appear suspiciously low in some countries, there does not seem to be much good information on the vaccinations.
Ironically, this perception is due to the information bubble in the West when it comes to China. There's a ton of extremely detailed information about infections in mainland China, but you'll simply never read about it in the popular press in the West. If you read Chinese, you can look up the address of every newly infected person on each day. Many cities will publish detailed contact tracing information about each case, telling you where they've been and when they were there, what trains and planes they've taken (and what seat they sat in), and all sorts of other information. It's kind of difficult to convey just how wrong the narrative that "we don't know what's going on in China" is.
The thing is, once you see the measures that China is taking, such as border quarantine, mass testing, and extremely detailed contact tracing, it's not at all mysterious how the country has managed to contain SARS-CoV-2.
> Geez, I wonder why especially old people - who lived through the CPC's chaos years ...
Those old people tend to actually be the most committed believers in the Communist Party. There are other issues at play, such as belief in Traditional Chinese Medicine.
> I am just saying that when an outbreak eventually will escape controllability, we will see a delayed mass dying.
It will be far lower (per capita) than the death toll in Europe and the US, because China managed to get through the era in which vaccines and antiviral drugs were unavailable without suffering mass infection. If China manages to vaccinate (or even boost) most of its elderly population before the lifting controls, its per-capita death toll will be only a tiny fraction of what the West has experienced.
They were still hugely protective against severe disease. So they work.
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