Chinese Official Admits China-Made COVID-19 Vaccines' Effectiveness 'Not High'

A senior Chinese official on Saturday admitted that China-made coronavirus vaccines have a low efficacy rate and may not provide enough protection against COVID-19.

When Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, appeared at a conference on Saturday in the city of Chengdu, he suggested that the country’s COVID-19 vaccines may need to be given at higher doses or in concert with other shots to boost their effectiveness.

"It's now under formal consideration whether we should use different vaccines from different technical lines for the immunization process," Gao said.

Dr. Tao Lina, a Shanghai-based vaccine expert, said the Chinese CDC director was comparing the inactivated vaccines produced by Sinopharm and Sinovac to the mRNA technology used in Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines.

“The levels of antibodies generated by our vaccines are lower than mRNA vaccines and the efficacy data are also lower,” Tao said. “I think it is a natural conclusion that our inactivated vaccines and adenovirus vectored vaccines are less effective than mRNA vaccines. However, vaccination should be carried on at full speed. We should not wait till a perfect vaccine is available.”

Health experts say mixing vaccines could boost effectiveness. In Britain, researchers are reviewing a combination of the Pfizer-BioNTech and the AstraZeneca vaccines.

“The good news is all these vaccines are coding for the same spike protein ... so therefore there are clinical trials and data seen that you can mix and match these different vaccine platforms,” Franz-Werner Haas, CEO of German biotech firm CureVac, told CNBC. The company believes the EU might give approval for its COVID-19 vaccine in May or June.

In China, drug companies Sinopharm and Sinovac are the leading producers of COVID-19 vaccines.

Sinovac’s CoronaVac vaccine was found to be as low as 50.4% effective against the virus in a late-stage trial in Brazil, and that is much lower than previously announced. It means it’s barely over the 50% threshold that makes a vaccine effective for general use, according to World Health Organization standards. In trials in Turkey and Indonesia, the Sinovac vaccine was found to be as high as 83.5% effective.

Sinopharm initially reported a 79.34% efficacy rate for its COVID-19 vaccine. However, detailed data from its clinical trial have yet to be released to the public. The Sinopharm vaccine has been approved for use in China, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates.