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As of June 7, 2022, China had administered almost 3.4 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines, representing around 28 percent of the 11.9 billion doses administered worldwide.

Vaccination rate

China has one of the highest COVID-19 vaccination rates in the world. Nevertheless, the situation varies substantially between age groups. Unlike many other regions such as Japan and western Europe, the Chinese elderly population has a lower vaccination rate than the younger generations. As of March 2022, only around half of people aged above 80 were fully vaccinated in the country, while less than 20 percent had their booster vaccinations. The insufficient vaccination rate among the most vulnerable group of the society partially explains China’s “Zero COVID” strategy, as many fear that the healthcare service will not be able to cope with the spread of COVID-19.

Chinese vaccines

As a major partner and stakeholder of BioNTech, the German developer of Comirnaty, Chinese pharmaceutical firm Fosun Pharma secured 100 million doses of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines in the early days of the pandemic. Nevertheless, no mRNA vaccine received approval from the Chinese regulator and the majority of the doses secured by Fosun remained undelivered. Sinovac and Sinopharm’s vaccines, the two most common COVID-19 vaccines in China, are both inactivated whole virus vaccines, which stimulate immune responses with killed SARS-CoV-2 virus. Despite having many advantages, they are significantly less effective than mRNA vaccines in preventing symptomatic illness and are especially problematic when encountering the latest Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2.