In other Chinese vaccine news, Sinovac Biotech becomes the second China-based company to win WHO approval for its shot, and Chinese vaccine makers promise even greater supply for developing countries.
As a small surge in COVID-19 cases disrupts life in Taiwan, and the island’s vaccine rollout continues slowly, Taiwanese officials blamed China for blocking some of their vaccine supply.
While the dominant origins theory for COVID-19 involves a natural source and no laboratories, the exact way that the pandemic began remains unknown. Some prominent scientists are becoming more skeptical of China’s denials of a lab leak, and want to see more records from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
True to form for the world’s most populous nation, China is now administering eye-popping numbers of COVID-19 vaccinations. In a span of nine days, 100 million people in China recently received a shot.
Sinopharm’s COVID-19 vaccine is the first Chinese-made shot to ever be approved for emergency use by the World Health Organization. The step affirms China’s growing scientific power, but is expected to have limited impact on vaccine supply in the short term.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping told his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, that he is “very concerned” about the surge in COVID-19 cases in India. China is supplying India with oxygen and other critical supplies to deal with the crisis, but bilateral tensions remain high with a still-unresolved border standoff.
Chinese students are allowed to return to classes in the U.S. — but do they want to?
Gao Fu, the director of China’s CDC, suggested mixing vaccines, adding doses, and looking into mRNA technology to improve the efficacy of COVID-19 shots. He later insisted that he wasn’t “admitting” to a low effectiveness of Chinese vaccines.
After the WHO released a report that raised more questions than answers about the origins of COVID-19, Beijing pushed back against accusations that it had interfered in the inquiry. The Chinese Foreign Ministry then suggested that the Fort Detrick biological lab in the U.S. should be investigated next.