Countries dependent on Chinese vaccines reporting surge in cases

Countries dependent on Chinese Covid-19 vaccines reporting surge in cases. Seychelles, Mongolia, Chile and Bahrain have in recent months relied on China’s vaccine diplomacy to propel their inoculation drives and get back to a version of normalcy in the time of a pandemic. The four countries have administered at least one dose of the vaccine to a large chunk of their populations, ranging between 58.7 per cent for Mongolia to nearly 72 per cent for SeychelleThese countries are now battling a fresh surge in Covid-19 infections that scientists say shouldn’t be happening. Some experts say the millions of doses provided by China to the countries in recent months may not be very effective in containing the coronavirus disease. Virologist Jin Dongyan, at the University of Hong Kong, told the New York Times that if the vaccines are sufficiently good, we should not see this pattern. “The Chinese have a responsibility to remedy this,” he added.

The two widely made available across the world – the shots developed by Chinese firms Sinovac and Sinopharm – have been given the World Health Organization’s emergency use listing (EUL). Sinovac’s CoronaVac shot has a low efficacy of 51%, and Sinopharm’s 79% against symptomatic disease. In contrast, both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. The Chinese foreign ministry said in a statement there was no direct link between the recent outbreaks and its vaccines, and that the vaccination rate in some regions may not be high enough to prevent the disease from spreading.