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China is ramping up its vaccine production. Photo: Reuters

China expects to produce 3 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccine by the end of the year

  • An official from the National Health Commission says the country will be ‘fully capable of meeting our own demand’ within months
  • China aims to inoculate 40 per cent of its population by the end of June, but is scrambling to produce enough vaccines
China’s coronavirus vaccine production is expected to hit 3 billion doses by the end of the year, according to the country’s health agency.

National Health Commission official Zheng Zhongwei made the prediction – which is in line with previous estimates by other health experts – at a conference in Sichuan province on Saturday.

“In the second half of this year, will be are fully capable of meeting our own demand,” said Zheng, who also heads the national Covid-19 vaccine task force.

The government has set a goal of vaccinating 40 per cent of its 1.4 billion population by the end of June, but faces an uphill struggle to meet the target, in part because of a lack of supplies.

However, Chinese pharmaceutical companies are rapidly expanding their production lines to manufacture Covid-19 vaccines to meet domestic demand.

One drug company, Sinovac, will double its capacity from 1 billion doses in February to 2 billion after completing a third production line this month, according to company announcements.

Sinovac is the maker of CoronaVac, a vaccine that has a 50.4 per cent efficacy rate based on trials run in Brazil.

China considers mixing Covid-19 vaccines to offer more protection

Meanwhile, the state-run company Sinopharm said it expects to produce 1 billion doses this year, and hopes to expand capacity to 3 billion in the future. Its vaccine is 79 per cent effective, according to results released by the company.

At the end of March, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said the country was now producing 5 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines a day.

Zheng told the conference that so far more than 250 million doses of Chinese-made vaccines have been administered worldwide, and their safety records have been sound.

Some 161 million doses have been given in China as of Saturday, according to the National Health Commission.

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At the same event, the head of the country’s Centre for Disease Control admitted that the level of protection offered by Chinese vaccines was “relatively low” and said people may be given a mix of vaccines in future.

Gao Fu, the director of the CDC, said China should not ignore new vaccine technology, such as the advanced genetic techniques used in the vaccines made by Moderna and BioNTech-Pfizer.

The jabs made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech both employ mRNA technology to stimulate the immune system and have efficacy rates of over 90 per cent.

“[We] need to consider how to solve the problem that the efficacy of existing vaccines is not high,” Gao said.

On Saturday, Sinopharm announced its recombinant vaccine had received approval for clinical trials.

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The recombinant vaccine uses genetic engineering to grow the spike protein found in the coronavirus virus and once injected it will teach the immune system to recognise the pathogen and create targeted antibodies, according to Sinopharm.

The recombinant technology is a mature process and suitable for large-scale production. The company said the production does not involve any live virus or infectious material, which means it does not require high levels of biosecurity on site.

Other Chinese vaccines, including those produced by Sinopharm and Sinovac, use inactivated viruses that have been killed or altered so they cannot infect people, a process that requires higher levels of biosecurity.

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