The rise in infections amid criticism that authorities in China have not been reporting infection data accurately has prompted many countries, including the US, Japan and Australia to make Covid-19 testing and screening a requirement for those arriving from, or by way of, China.
Liu’s assessment follows comments last week by Mike Ryan, the WHO’s emergencies director, that current figures being published from China under-represented numbers of hospital admissions, ICU admissions and “particularly in terms of death”.
EU authorities were also asked to step up the “testing and sequencing of waste water from airports with international flights and aircraft arriving from China” to monitor for potential new variants of the coronavirus.
Earlier this week, Beijing denounced entry restrictions on Chinese travellers as unscientific and “unacceptable” for targeting the country. With the exception of Hong Kong, mainland Chinese authorities require incoming travellers to undergo on-site polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, without regard to where they embarked.
Answering questions about China’s response to offers of vaccine assistance from the US, Liu said his country’s domestically developed vaccines were as effective as the mRNA types developed in the US.
“We have seen a rapid increase in Covid cases recently. However, globally speaking, China still had the lowest rates of severe cases and mortality,” he said. “The surge of infections in China is not an unusual case from other places in the world.”
“The Chinese people were able to hold on through the most dangerous time” of Covid-19’s spread, he added. “This proves, I think, the safety and efficacy of the vaccines” developed in China.
“Comparing the inactivated vaccine, which is mainly produced by Chinese by China with mRNA vaccines, they have the same effectiveness in preventing severe cases caused by Omicron,” Liu said, referring to the coronavirus subvariant and citing the results of a study by the University of Hong Kong.
A summary of that study, published last March, showed China’s home-grown CoronaVac 97.9 per cent to be effective against “severe/fatal disease” among those 60 years of age or older, compared with 98.0 per cent for the mRNA vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.
The results also deemed CoronaVac 50.7 per cent effective against mild or moderate disease in the same age group, compared with 71.6 per cent for the Pfizer/BioNTech jab.
