Yeah what's with that? Certainly they among all countries could effectively get everyone vaccinated for whom it's safe, so I'm assuming they chose not to. Why?
The government says 90% of the population has received a single dose of Sinopharm. It probably doesn't matter if that figure is trustworthy, since the vaccine isn't terribly effective, anyway. The Chinese are finally on the brink of rolling out their own mRNA vaccine [1], which should be much better, but it's late in the game (two years since we started mass vaccinations in the U.S.). Of course, they had the opportunity to buy vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna early on, but they chose not to. I think it's fair to speculate that Xi was more comfortable with the zero-covid approach, with the possibility of a total collapse of the Chinese health care system and the mass deaths that would follow, than how the optics of purchasing Western vaccines would affect him politically.
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It doesn't make sense without vaccines. Unfortunately the Chinese had low vaccine adoption and a less effective one apparently.
Yeah what's with that? Certainly they among all countries could effectively get everyone vaccinated for whom it's safe, so I'm assuming they chose not to. Why?
The government says 90% of the population has received a single dose of Sinopharm. It probably doesn't matter if that figure is trustworthy, since the vaccine isn't terribly effective, anyway. The Chinese are finally on the brink of rolling out their own mRNA vaccine [1], which should be much better, but it's late in the game (two years since we started mass vaccinations in the U.S.). Of course, they had the opportunity to buy vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna early on, but they chose not to. I think it's fair to speculate that Xi was more comfortable with the zero-covid approach, with the possibility of a total collapse of the Chinese health care system and the mass deaths that would follow, than how the optics of purchasing Western vaccines would affect him politically.
1: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01690-3
Interesting, thanks