China is planning to mix COVID-19 vaccines as a way of further boosting vaccine efficacy, reports Reuters citing a top disease control official of the country.
Available data shows Chinese vaccines lag behind others including Pfizer and Moderna in terms of efficacy, but require less stringent temperature controls during storage.
Giving people doses of different vaccines is one way to improve vaccines that don’t have very high rates of protection, Gao Fu, the director of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on Saturday.
Gao told in a conference, “Inoculation using vaccines of different technical lines is being considered.”
Gao said that taking steps to optimize the vaccine process including changing the number of doses and the length of time between doses was a definite solution to efficacy issues.
A clinical trial in Brazil notified that China’s Sinovac Biotech is over 50% effective while Turkish research said that the vaccine has 83.5% effectiveness.
China has developed four domestic vaccines approved for public use and a fifth for smaller-scale emergency use. An official said on Saturday that the country will likely produce 3 billion doses by the end of the year.
However, China is the first county that reported the novel coronavirus first at its city of Wuhan in 2019.
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