Chinese anti-Covid vaccines are safe and have even been administered to top leaders such as President Xi Jinping, health authorities announced on Saturday, in a bid to reassure Chinese about their quality.
A year and a half after the start of the vaccination campaign in the country, this is the first time that China clearly mentions the vaccination status of the leaders of the communist regime.
Currently, the Asian giant only registers a few hundred new positive cases per day and the authorities are having great difficulty in convincing some Chinese to get vaccinated, especially the elderly.
“They have all been with vaccines produced in China”
The population does not feel urgency about the health situation and many residents distrust the quality of Chinese vaccines, after several scandals in the last decade.
“The ensemble of current leaders of the Communist Party and of the State on these vaccines against Covid-19 and all of them with vaccine products in China”, announced by samedi Zeng Yixin, the vice-minister of health.
This category obviously includes President Xi Jinping or Premier Li Keqiang. “This shows that our leaders take the prevention and control of Covid-19 very seriously and have great confidence in China’s Covid vaccines,” Zeng Yixin told a news conference.
The most widely used Chinese vaccines are those of the private laboratory Sinovac and those of the state pharmaceutical giant Sinopharm. China has not yet authorized the use of foreign Covid vaccines on its soil.
A strict health policy
The authorities are working to dispel the fears fueled, according to them, by certain information spread on the Internet. “Covid vaccines do not cause leukemia, diabetes” and “do not cause tumor proliferation,” Wang Fusheng, director of the infectious disease department at Beijing 301 Military Hospital, told reporters on Saturday.
China continues to enforce a strict health policy, particularly in the name of protecting the elderly, who are poorly vaccinated. Among those over 60, while 89.6% received at least one dose, only 67.3% received three doses, a rate that drops to 38.4% among those over 80, Zeng said on Saturday.
In addition to the drastic reduction of international air links since 2020, China places people who test positive in mandatory quarantine and decrees localized confinements as soon as some cases appear.
Source: BFM TV
