CNBC is raising an alarm about China’s Covid-19 vaccines.
Five of the six countries “with both high vaccination rates and high rates of Covid-19 infection … rely on vaccines made in China,” CNBC said in an article published here on Wednesday, July 7, 2021.
CNBC said it identified 36 countries with more than 1,000 weekly new confirmed cases per million people as of July 6, then identified a subset of those countries where more than 60% of the population has received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine.
Those 6 countries are the United Arab Emirates, Seychelles, Mongolia, Uruguay, Chile, and the United Kingdom. Only the latter doesn’t rely on China as their primary vaccine source, although all get vaccines from other sources.
For example, about 87% of Mongolia’s shots were supplied by China, 9% by Pfizer, and 3% by Russia. About 63% of that country’s population has been vaccinated, but infections have jumped in that country in the last few months (see chart in article linked above). The story is similar in the other countries.
“Several factors can cause a surge in Covid cases in countries with high vaccination rates,” CNBC said. “Vaccines don’t offer 100% protection, so those who are inoculated can still be infected. At the same time, new variants of the coronavirus could prove better at overcoming vaccines.”
Whether the Delta variant — which is rapidly becoming the dominant strain in low-vaccination-rate areas of the U.S. — is more resistant to existing vaccines is a matter of study and debate. And while CNBC‘s study raises questions about the efficacy of China’s vaccines, epidemiologists say it’s better than nothing and especially countries with limited vaccine access shouldn’t turn it down.
Comparing vaccines’ efficacy using data from drug trials is tricky, because the data aren’t strictly comparable, but according to rough figures in the CNBC article, the two major Chinese vaccines score lower in efficacy than most others, although they’re not ineffective and they’ve been approved by the World Health Organization for emergency use.
A Hong Kong-based epidemiologist told CNBC he thinks “relatively few severe cases and deaths from COVID-19 should be achievable with high coverage of any of the available vaccines.”
So the answer appears to be, not “no good,” but “not as good.” If you’re a poor country, though, beggars aren’t choosers and you’ll want to take what you can get.
Meanwhile, the undercurrent beneath all of this is the implication that their biotechnology isn’t as good as ours.