Coronavirus: China says it can produce 1 billion doses of a Sinopharm vaccine this year
- Ministry of Industry and Information says there will be enough vaccine for mass inoculations domestically, including 100 million doses ahead of Lunar New Year
- China has also agreed to provide vaccines to a large number of countries, but it remains unclear how exports will be handled
China can produce 1 billion doses this year of the newly approved vaccine against Covid 19 developed by Beijing Institute of Biological Products, a subsidiary of the state-owned conglomerate Sinopharm, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information.
The ministry also said on Tuesday that there would be enough vaccines for mass inoculation domestically, though it did not specify how many doses it is expecting.
Eighteen vaccine makers in China are ramping up production capacity, the ministry said, for all five vaccine types China is using or researching.
China has previously identified the five types: inactivated vaccines; adenovirus vector vaccines, protein subunit vaccines, mRNA vaccines and vaccines using attenuated flu virus as vectors. Only the Sinopharm inactivated vaccine has released efficacy data so far.
China has already agreed to provide vaccines to a large number of countries. A flurry of orders also rushed in after China gave conditional approval in late December to the Sinopharm product, which is an inactivated vaccine that uses a dead virus to help the body develop an immune response.
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China will be pressed to meet the demands of the massive export orders while also supplying enough two-dose vaccinations to most of its 1.3 billion citizens to achieve herd immunity.
In September, Gao Fu, head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said that mass inoculation domestically was not necessary because transmission of Covid-19 was under control.