Seoul, South Korea
CNN
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Chinese President Xi Jinping and other leaders of the country have been given domestic COVID-19 vaccines, the ruling Communist Party said in a rare disclosure aimed at provoking China booster program,
Zeng Yixin, deputy head of the National Health Commission (NHC), said on Saturday that “all current state and party leaders in China” with domestically-made shots, referring to top officials at national and sub-national levels of Covid- 19 have been vaccinated against, which includes. Xi, Premier Li Keqiang and other senior leaders.
Health information about Chinese leaders is rare to be made public, but the statement was made amid the recent wave of Covid-19 infections and public concerns about the safety of vaccines.
Zeng did not specify when officials were vaccinated or if they received booster shots. President Xi’s vaccination status had not previously been disclosed to the public.
China has repeatedly sought to answer questions about the safety of its vaccines and boost vaccination rates, especially among the elderly. While about 90% of China’s vaccable population is fully vaccinated, only 61% of people over the age of 80 have been fully vaccinated and only 38.4% have received booster shots, according to the NHC. according.
On Saturday, the NHC addressed online speculation over the safety of vaccines, including allegations that they cause leukemia and diabetes in children, saying the figures show no evidence of these diseases linked to vaccines.
NHC said only about 70 people per million of the nearly 3.4 billion doses of COVID-19 administered in China reported side effects — one percent less than other vaccines such as polio, measles, hepatitis B, rabies and influenza. .
China has so far only approved domestically manufactured vaccines for use in the mainland, including SinoPharm and Sinovac which use inactivated viruses instead of genetically engineered mRNA vaccines. In trials, these vaccines have shown less efficacy than their mRNA counterparts – a criticism dismissed by Beijing as a “bias-driven … smear”. Instead Beijing has pointed to the effectiveness of vaccines as a metric of their success in reducing severe cases and deaths.
China has azero covidThis year’s policy tends to undermine like-country approaches, despite the Omicron edition’s increased transmittance.
Many cities have been closed in response to new waves of infections, and last month the head of Beijing’s Communist Party, Cai Qi, reportedly said that the city can keep the policy in place “For the next five years.”