The Omicron variant of coronavirus forced governments across the world to tighten border controls, hasten vaccination drives and reinstate social distancing last week. But in Dalian, China, authorities reclassified the virus risk in parts of the north-eastern port city from “medium” to “low”.
The contrast, Chinese health officials and experts said, reflected how Beijing’s unwavering zero-Covid policy had proven a “magic bullet”, preventing at least 200m infections and 3m deaths. Western hubris, they argued, had led to negligence and now the potentially destabilizing Omicron outbreak.
“Western countries are likely to be gripped by Omicron if the variant proves highly infectious, with their unscientific easing of epidemic control measures and overconfidence in vaccines,” reported the Global Times, a nationalist news service.
State media crowing, however, belied uncertainty in the minds of many in China over the efficacy and durability of immunity of the country’s locally produced vaccines as Beijing rolls out booster shots and inoculations for children as young as three.
Doubt over the jabs matter not only for the world’s most populous country, where 2.5bn doses have been administered to 1.4bn people. They also matter to the hundreds of millions of people who have received vaccines made by Sinovac and Sinopharm — both of which use an inactivated vaccine rather than the genetic code used by mRNA vaccines such as BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna.
Ben Cowling, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong, said there was “still a lot more uncertainty about the effectiveness of inactivated vaccines compared to some of the other vaccines being widely used, like the two mRNA vaccines and the AstraZeneca vaccine”.
China’s recent Delta outbreak — which spread to more than half the country’s provinces and prompted local lockdowns — indicated that the effectiveness of the Chinese-made vaccines “against infection and transmission can’t be that high because very stringent public health measures were still needed to control those outbreaks”, said Cowling.
But the outbreak also suggested “vaccine effectiveness against severe Covid-19 appears to be high because the recent outbreaks have included very few severe cases’ .