Official: Chinese vaccines’ effectiveness low

‘In a rare admission of the weakness of Chinese coronavirus vaccines, the country’s top disease control official says their effectiveness is low and the government is considering mixing them to give them a boost. Chinese vaccines “don’t have very high protection rates,” said the director of the China Centers for Disease Control, Gao Fu, at a conference Saturday in the southwestern city of Chengdu.

‘Beijing has distributed hundreds of millions of doses in other countries while also trying to promote doubt about the effectiveness of Western vaccines. “It’s now under formal consideration whether we should use different vaccines from different technical lines for the immunization process,” Gao said.’

Read here (AP News, Apr 11, 2021)

Frozen food package polluted by living coronavirus could cause infection: China’s CDC

‘China's disease control authority said on Saturday (Oct 17) that contact with frozen food packaging contaminated by living new coronavirus could cause infection. The conclusion came as the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) detected and isolated living coronavirus on the outer packaging of frozen cod during efforts to trace the virus in an outbreak reported last week in the city of Qingdao, the agency said on its website.

‘The finding, a world first, suggests it is possible for the virus to be conveyed over long distances via frozen goods, it said.’

Read here (Straits Times, Oct 17, 2020)