The many failures of China’s vaccine programme

At the start of the year Sebastián Piñera, president of Chile, went to Santiago airport personally to greet a consignment of vaccines from China. ‘Today is a day of joy, excitement and hope,’ he said from a podium on the tarmac. ‘As you see behind me, there is the plane that brought a shipment of almost two million doses of Sinovac vaccines.’ By April, Chile had suffered one of the worst Covid surges in Latin America. The joy and hope, it seemed, had been misplaced.

A few weeks ago, Chile’s government announced that, after a real-world study involving 10.5 million Chileans, Sinovac turned out to be only 16 per cent effective at reducing the risk of infection after one shot and 67 per cent effective two weeks after the second dose. Even Chile’s fast-paced vaccine programme — it is more extensive than Britain’s — has not been enough to prevent a new wave and a new lockdown.

Chinese state media, such as China Daily, owned by the Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist party, have tried to counter such bad news with boasts that China’s vaccines are ‘saving the world’ from Covid. Yet the more we learn about Sinovac the more dubious this claim becomes.

By April it became clear that the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines were helping Britain, America, Israel and others to get on top of the outbreak, while countries that were relying on Chinese vaccines — such as Brazil, Chile, Turkey, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia — were struggling to do so. Gao Fu, head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, made what was, for a Chinese government official, an extraordinary admission. The three vaccines produced by the country so far, he said at a conference, ‘don’t have very high rates of protection’.