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China Medicine

China is Vaccinating a Staggering 20 Million People a Day (nature.com) 210

For more than a week, an average of about 20 million people have been vaccinated against COVID-19 every day in China. At this rate, the nation would have fully vaccinated the entire UK population in little more than six days. From a report: China now accounts for more than half of the 35 million or so people around the world receiving a COVID-19 shot each day. Zoltan Kis, a chemical engineer in the Future Vaccine Manufacturing Research Hub at Imperial College London, doesn't know of "anything even close to those production scales" for a vaccine. "The manufacturing efforts required in China to reach this high production throughput are tremendous," he says. The majority of doses are of one of two vaccines, both of which have been approved for emergency use worldwide by the World Health Organization (WHO). CoronaVac -- produced by Beijing-based company Sinovac -- showed an efficacy of 51% against symptoms of COVID-19 in clinical trials, and much higher protection against severe disease and death. The second jab was developed in Beijing by state-owned firm Sinopharm and has demonstrated an efficacy of 79% against symptomatic disease and hospitalization.
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China is Vaccinating a Staggering 20 Million People a Day

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  • by Anonymous Coward
    Knock-off Nation's garbage sinopharm. About 45% efficacy. Not fully tested. All done purely for PR and to try and keep up appearances. Basically a knock-off vaccine.
    • by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @11:22AM (#61469766) Journal

      Knock-off Nation's garbage sinopharm. About 45% efficacy.

      As TFA says (if you'd bothered to look, or are you disputing the numbers?)
        - Two vaccines. One 51%, the other 79%.

      Not fully tested.

      None of them are. In a pandemic "the customer is the final tester".

      All done purely for PR and to try and keep up appearances

      Seems to me that preventing one out of two, or four out of five, cases is more than just "appearances".

      They've got a LOT of people and the virus can run through them like a forest fire, so getting them even less-than-superb protection early is far better than leaving them unprotected while waiting for something better to be produced in sufficient bulk. The fewer of them that become culture media for a virus' self-improvement program, the better off we'll ALL be - and the more of them that will survive.

      • by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @11:26AM (#61469798) Homepage Journal
        It'll be interesting to see how well this works out, with shooting up your entire population with vaccines that aren't as effective as other nations have out there.

        The Chinese have stolen so much tech from the US and the rest of the west, I'm really surprised they don't have pretty much the same vaccines over there.

        Anyway, I guess the thought is, "Better than nothing", eh?

      • If only you took the time to cross reference your information, you'll see that in practice the Chinese vaccines aren't even close to add effective as advertised by the ccp.

        Cases are soaring in countries which invested a lot in those vaccines, and the immune response is so low that they start giving a third injection, sometimes with a different vaccine.

        https://arstechnica.com/scienc... [arstechnica.com]

      • There might be some substance in the FP, but once you add the racist flavoring, it's too hard to taste the rest of it. But if you have to feed the troll, can't you at least go for a meaningful Subject?

        My meta-solution approach would involve knowing the source in a multidimensional sense of "knowing". I don't think I'd set my filtering to focus on dimensions that are closely and specifically related to racism, but rather I'd prefer to filter on open-minded versus close-minded.

        I should say something about the

        • At it's peak, the U.S. was vaccinating about 1.2% of it's population *per* day.

          China is now vaccinating about 1.5% of it's population per day.

          I don't see anything unusual in that degree of preparation. Even if they maintain this rate, it will take them over 2 months to vaccinate their population. And they won't. They are in the sweet spot now.

          • by shanen ( 462549 )

            Which other countries have managed to contain major outbreaks of Covid-19? (I can only think of one besides China.)

            Which other countries were able to set up quarantine facilities to isolate the infected people from their own families? (I know of none, but I know of a few weak attempts.)

            Which other countries were ready and willing to forcibly lock down millions of people who might be "contaminated" with an unknown disease? (I know of no examples outside of China.)

            My perception is that China was ready for som

            • China was ready for something MUCH worse than Covid-19.

              It's almost as if they had experienced:
              Bird Flu H5N1, SARS, Hong Kong Flu and the Asian Flu in the last 50 years...

              • by shanen ( 462549 )

                I believe those are valid examples, but I'm insufficiently familiar with the Chinese handling of those diseases to compare with the more recent response to Covid-19. However, I have read several books about Ebola, and some parts of the Chinese response to Covid-19 did strike me as possibly derived from studying how Ebola was handled. But as far as I know, Ebola has never started spreading outside of Africa, though the Chinese have been investing heavily in Africa and I recently read a book about the surpris

            • australia and new zealand got rid of it completely. unfortunatly its jumped out of returned travellers quarantine a couple of times but so far both countries have been able to get back on top of it again.
            • My perception is that China was ready for something MUCH worse than Covid-19.

              Yes, they were. SARS. They had already contained and eradicated an outbreak of that. SARS is a close relative of the virus behind COVID-19 (which is actually named SARS-CoV-2). SARS (SARS-CoV-1) is far more deadly (11% case fatality rate, prognosis now 9.5%), but less contagious. China stopped and eradicated it at 8,422 cases, then traced it to horseshoe bats.

              The Wuhan lab is the main one that works with SARS and other bat vi

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      It's not useless. The Russian vaccine MAY be useless, but the Chinese vaccines are just "less useful". Even the Russian vaccine may be useful. We can't tell because the delivered versions weren't manufactured to the same specs as the tested version, and they've refused to say what those specs are. (Likely they don't know...which is really bad.)

      The Chinese versions, however, probably keep people out of the emergency room fairly well, and render a substantial proportion of the vaccinated immune. That's n

    • Still, amazing what you can do when instead of pot for shot schemes, you give people a choice between the vaccine and a bullet.

      Ain't totalitarianism wonderful.

      • We can see you got all your learning from Facebook and your drunk uncle.
      • I am living in China. No one has been shot for refusing the vaccine. I personally have been too lazy to wait in the lines, especially when it's basically like Christmas morning to get the few in stock each day. You may lose your job if you refused. Those companies are government owned primarily. As far as I know, the vaccine is free for citizens too but I haven't cared to ask in detail. Is this what you mean about totalitarian? For me, sounds communist if but I am happy to debate the totalitarian parts of t

        • Too Lazy/Not offered significantly in your area is not equal to "We need to reach a certain number of vaccines given out and we're willing to do whatever it takes to get there".

          You might just be in an area that doesn't have sufficient supply, from the sound of it.

    • by fermion ( 181285 )
      about 50% is where a vaccine needs to be. For the first gen covid vaccine, what we mostly are looking at right now is hospitalizations, as the lack of medical resources are what is killing people. On a secondary level, as we donâ(TM)t really know the extent of chronic effects of covid, we still want to mimize infection.
    • by Yi Ding ( 635572 )

      79% https://www.who.int/news-room/... [who.int]

      The Chinese are the only ones making inactivated whole virus vaccines, so if they're "knocking off" anyone, it'd be Jonas Salk.

    • by Z80a ( 971949 )

      45% is pretty much enough to stop covid, as you make it very hard to spread.

      • 45% is not enough. The R0 is estimated as 2.9. It could be higher for variants. You need 1-1/2.9=65% of the population to be immune. That include kids. So with a vaccine with 80% efficacy, you could afford to vaccinate about 81% of your population.

  • by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @10:40AM (#61469546)

    China is an authoritarian dictatorship with an Eastern culture of deference to authority. That is a poor combination if the objective is quality control of just about anything.

    They've been caught giving fake childhood vaccines to their own children and they've been caught lacing their children's food with melamine to make the nutritional content chemical tests look more favorable.

    I say this again: they did this to their own children and the institutional and incentive structures (and perhaps even the same exact people) that let it happen are still in charge.

    It's perfectly possible they're giving out 20 million shots a day. Who the fuck knows what's in them?

    • by klipclop ( 6724090 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @11:07AM (#61469698)
      They could also just be saying they are giving 20million vaccinations a day when they aren't. CCP lies about everything.
    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      You're conceptualizing an entire country as one unified individual. This is wrong as reflected in your emotional reporting of actual facts.

      China is full of extremely hungry and poorly regulated capitalist companies, many of whom have very poor morals. They didn't see the poisoning of children as poisoning their own children. Etc.

      OTOH, China is full of extremely hungry and poorly regulated capitalist companies, many of whom have very poor morals. One should be very skeptical of any claims they make about

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      In a country of 1.4 billion people there are of course going to be crooks. They are in jail now, by the way, so your insinuation that "they" are okay with this is nonsense.

      This kind of unwarranted extrapolation is the basis of a lot of racism, so be careful with it.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The situation with the Uyghurs is serious, it's not a magic word you utter to win any argument want China.

          The British government does awful stuff, violating human rights. It doesn't mean that the British AZ vaccine is just a scam. That's a leap of logic that comes from hatred.

  • What's making them stagger? Is it the vaccine, or is Covid, or are they just drunk?

  • Per-capita, please (Score:5, Insightful)

    by smoot123 ( 1027084 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @10:44AM (#61469570)

    China also has 20 times the population of the UK. Anything China does is going to be on enormous scale in absolute terms.

    OurWorldInData [ourworldindata.org] has per-capita numbers. China is in fact vaccinating a relatively large portion of their population per day (about 1.4% per day, woo-hoo!). At it's peak, the UK vaccinated just under 0.9% and the US just a skoosh over 1%.

    Don't get me wrong. This is fantastic news. It's just not as fantastic as the screaming headline would have you believe.

    • 1.4% is still very impressive. I only wonder why it took them so long to take off. Weren't their vaccines "authorized" in summer 2020?

      It almost sounds like they wanted to test the vaccine on foreign countries first, and now that they have enough data started to vaccinate their own.

    • Precisely....

      Here in Europe we can easily vaccinate the same amount or even more (in my country we tested it out by vaccinating... I think we ended up at 2.1% of the population in a single day - It's possible. We just dont get enough juice to do it for the full month it would then take to get everyone vaccinated)

      I'm getting fed up with people who dont understand scale.... "oh, they have it so bad in India. 300.000 people have died now".... Yes, that puts them squarely among the top 20% of countries managing

      • Has NO "journalist" (journalism means being able to critically asses a story, so I'm having a hard time calling them that without quotationmarks) ever mastered 6th grade math ?

        They sure have! They understand that 20 million is greater than 1.4. The problem is their goal. It's not to keep you informed, it's to get you to click the link.

        • Plus one for the laugh.... You are ofcourse correct. It still saddens me that we've gone from "reporting the news" to "creating the news". I miss the time when a newspaper had news I wanted to read and get interested in.

      • by fred6666 ( 4718031 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @12:02PM (#61469966)

        China is averaging 1.4% per week these days. It's not just a single day outlier.

      • "oh, they have it so bad in India."

        They have it bad in India because all the neighbouring countries with similar genetics, weather, per capita income, health care facilities have much lower case rate, death rate and GDP contraction.

  • by kenh ( 9056 )

    So what? Delayed and less effective - we started vaccinating 6 months ago in America with vaccines with 90% or greater efficacy. I can only imagine the quality process behind producing 20 million doses a day...

  • by fred6666 ( 4718031 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @10:51AM (#61469610)

    And yet, no Chinese manufacturer published phase 3 results in a peer-reviewed journal.

    I wouldn't trust their vaccine.

    • it seems they finally did: https://jamanetwork.com/journa... [jamanetwork.com]

    • by kbahey ( 102895 )

      And yet, no Chinese manufacturer published phase 3 results in a peer-reviewed journal.

      I wouldn't trust their vaccine.

      Absolutely ...

      There is even evidence that one dose does nothing, unlike Pfizer, Moderna and even Astra Zeneca, where a single dose give a good level of protection.

      Some countries using vaccines from China, like Seychelles [bbc.com] (also here [bbc.com]), and Chile [bbc.com] found out the hard way.

      No data on how the two dose protection is like though ...

  • by sinij ( 911942 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @10:54AM (#61469628)
    Effect of 2 Inactivated SARS-CoV-2 Vaccines on Symptomatic COVID-19 Infection in Adults [jamanetwork.com]

    This prespecified interim analysis of a randomized clinical trial included 40382 participants who received at least 1 dose of a 2-dose inactivated vaccine series developed from either SARS-CoV-2 WIV04 (5 mg/dose) or HB02 (4 mg/dose) strains or an aluminum hydroxide-only control, with a primary end point of the incidence of symptomatic COVID-19 at least 14 days after the second injection. The efficacy for the 2 vaccines, compared with an aluminum hydroxide-only control, was 72.8% in the WIV04 group and 78.1% in the HB02 group; both comparisons were statistically significant.

    This is much lower than any of the Western vaccines.

    • by sinij ( 911942 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @10:59AM (#61469654)
      Also, early adopters of Chinese vaccines see case surges [arstechnica.com]

      Unpublished data out of Serbia suggested that some people given the vaccine may not produce antibodies to fight off the pandemic coronavirus three months after vaccination, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal. "The Sinopharm vaccine is not immunogenic enough, and it appears that its impact is especially low on elderly recipients," said Olgica Djurkovic-Djakovic, of the University of Belgrade, who led the unpublished study and shared the findings with the Journal.

      This is only relevant to SinoPharm and not other vaccines. It might be even quality control issue and not vaccine itself.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The UK was the earliest of the early adopters with the AZ and Pfizer vaccines, and is currently seeing a 3rd want surge. We have quite high vaccination rates too.

        The issue seems to be that the surge is among young people who are still not vaccinated. Like most countries we started with older people.

    • And yet, totally in line with what you would expect from a normal vaccine. Anything about 50% is considered good, 70% outstanding.

      Most "western vaccines", if you prefer that term, also cruise at around 70%, for ONE shot. Only by giving a second, do you build it up. This is also a well known strategy, used by other vaccines for diseases like hepatitis or encephalitis, where you are supposed to get a "booster shot", after 6 months.

      This is acceptable because the main reason for vaccinating, is not to prevent t

    • AstraZeneca and Janssen both have numbers in that range or even below.

      AstraZeneca is 76-81% (81% is with giving the second dose after 12 weeks or more)
      Janssen is 66%. 72% if you include only the US trial.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      The efficacy is not the problem with the chinese vaccines. It's their lack of transparency, we don't know if we can really trust those numbers.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's better than Astra Zenica. You have to remember to compare like for like - the phrase 3 trials were done in Brazil, for example. The Brazilian variant is pretty nasty, and the British AZ vaccine is only 10% effective against it.

      • by sinij ( 911942 )

        The Brazilian variant ... AZ vaccine is only 10% effective against it.

        Citation?

        • The Brazilian variant ... AZ vaccine is only 10% effective against it.

          Citation?

          https://www.medrxiv.org/conten... [medrxiv.org]

          The 10% figure hails from this paper.

          • by sinij ( 911942 )
            Follow-up question on this, it seems at CI 95% stats barely reach significance. Am I misunderstanding it?
          • I never saw this paper before. However, given the time of the trial, and it's relative size, I can say that it would seem unreasonable to actually get a significant number showing.

            The trial started 2 weeks prior to the summer peak number of infected in july, and then the virus was nearly gone, until the flu season started up again in december, when the project ended.
            As a mathematician, even without doing the math for them, I can tell you that this means that the infection rate was so low that the number in

  • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @10:58AM (#61469642)

    Those numbers are good, and sound super impressive, especially compared to the USA's height of 3.5 million per day. But it's always worth remembering how frigging big China is.

    That said 20million per day is 1.43% of the population. And most western countries in an advance stage of their vaccination programs peaked around the 0.8-1.2% mark.

  • The term "rate" is overloaded here.

    Sure, it can mean 20 million per day-- that's a rate-- but that's misleading when you compare apples (1.38 billion) with oranges (64 million) people.

    20/64 would be done in a few days and bob's yer uncle. 20/1380 is still a very good rate but it's going to take over 2 months. China has a very large population.

    Unfortunately, Sinopharm is less effective and on it's own could lead to the development of a super strain that's immune to Sinopharm. But the other measures China

  • by Parker Lewis ( 999165 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @07:12PM (#61471932)

    Here in Brazil, after our FDA equivalent approved the studies about CoronaVac at the beginning of 2021, and due this, it was the first vaccine we started to produce in mass against the Corona virus. My father has more than 70, a hearth disease and diabetes. One month after the second shot, he got the virus. He felt some body pain for 2 days, and during 3 days, a bit of difficulty to breath. But he recovered well and was not even required to go to the hospital. More important: he is alive! Same with my uncle, older than him. My stepmother, around 55 has not the same luck: she still didn't receive the vaccine and gone to the hospital for 3 weeks, received oxygen, and now she is back to home, alive, thankfully, with some minor sequels.

    So, of course, if I could choose, I would pick Pfizer or any one with higher efficiency for my father. But even "ok" vaccines like CoronaVac are better than no vaccine in poor countries like here.

We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it. -- Saul Alinsky

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