China is vaccinating almost 14 million people a day, the fastest pace in the world, as the nation races to protect its COVID-19 advantage in the face of major Western nations reopening their economies.
The ramp-up in shots is being helped by a flare-up of virus cases in Anhui and Liaoning provinces.
Videos on social media showed citizens rushing to get their vaccines, with long lines at inoculation sites despite heavy rain.
Photo: Reuters
Hefei, Anhui’s capital, administered 360,000 vaccine doses on Friday last week, the most in a single day for the hub of 10 million people, Xinhua news agency reported.
Many nations in Asia, including China, are struggling to combat vaccine hesitation. Some people have been wooed into a sense of complacency due to the region’s early success in containing the virus, while others simply do not trust the safety or efficacy of the vaccines available.
However, outbreaks in Singapore and Taiwan are testing that reluctance as harsher lockdown measures are imposed, bringing into clearer focus the understanding that being vaccinated can help stop serious illness.
Beijing is loathe to lose the advantage it has built up over the US and other major Western economies with its successful containment of the pathogen, and has added pressure through things like calling for mandatory vaccination among state-owned enterprise employees and members of the Chinese Communist Party.
The escalation of shots in China — Chinese National Health Commission data showed that 13.7 million vaccines were administered on Friday last week — means the nation is now closer to its target of vaccinating 40 percent of its population, or at least delivering 560 million doses, by the end of next month.
As of Sunday, about 393 million doses had been given, with 210 million of those occurring over the past month, a sign of the accelerating roll out, official data showed.
China can now administer 20 million doses a day, according to the WHO.
“Don’t hesitate, get vaccinated,” Xinhua news agency said on its WeChat account. “The fact that new infected people are not vaccinated is undoubtedly a wake-up call to all — to build an immunization barrier, vaccination is not an option, but a must.”
It is estimated that China would have 900 million to 1 billion people vaccinated by next year, when herd immunity is expected to be reached, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention Director George Fu Gao (高福) said in an interview.
China has enforced some of the harshest approaches in the world in terms of putting whole regions into lockdown and people into quarantine, even when only cases in the single digits are detected.
Because of the latest outbreak, schools have been closed in the coastal city of Yingkou in Liaoning Province, while people are banned from leaving their residential compounds in certain regions of Anhui Province.
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