BEIJING (Reuters) – China has accelerated its COVID-19 vaccinations, administered 10 million doses in about a week, and is considering varied visa policies based on vaccination and virus conditions in different countries, officials said on Sunday.
The country had administered 74.96 million doses of vaccine on Saturday, health committee spokesman Mi Feng told a newsletter. That’s up from 64.98 million on March 14.
According to state media and a top health adviser, China aims to vaccinate 40% of its 1.4 billion people by the middle of the year. China was one of the first countries to start administering vaccines last year and has exported millions of doses, but vaccination coverage has lagged behind that of countries like Israel and the United States.
More than 70 million doses of Sinovac Biotech’s injection have been administered worldwide, a company spokesman told the press conference, without specifying how many of them had been administered in China.
Beijing is considering differentiated policies for issuing visas, flights and controls on the number of people arriving in China based on vaccination progress and COVID-19 situations in different countries.
“We are not exempting vaccinated people from testing and isolation measures for the time being,” said Feng Zijian, vice director of the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC).
But he said China will pay attention to international progress in developing “vaccine passports” and adjust measures to contain the virus after the domestic population reaches high levels of immunization.
China’s year-round vaccine production can fully meet the needs of the entire country, said Mao Junfeng, an official in the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
He said the supply of materials for vaccine production, including glass vials and syringes, is “relatively stable”.
Countries with a high percentage of elderly people should receive priority vaccination, said Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at China CDC.
If all countries continue their vaccination programs at the same pace, it is possible that each country will only achieve 10% or 30% immunity, not enough to protect the population, Wu explained at the China Development Forum in Beijing on Saturday night.
“We need to get to 70% -80% in one country, then a second country and then a third country as soon as possible,” Wu said.
China has approved four locally developed general public use vaccines from Sinovac, CanSino Biologics and two divisions of China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm).
A fifth vaccine, developed by the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was approved for emergency use last week.
Reporting by Roxanne Liu and Ryan Woo; Edited by William Mallard and Sam Holmes