China official calls reports he said country's COVID-19 vaccines weren't very effective 'a complete misunderstanding'

Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine.
(Image credit: STR/AFP via Getty Images)

Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Gao Fu is walking back comments he made about the country's COVID-19 vaccines.

The vaccines "don't have very high protection rates," Gao reportedly said Saturday at a conference in Chengdu. "It's now under formal consideration whether we should use different vaccines from different technical lines of the immunization process," he added, explaining that China was considering a few different options for how to boost effectiveness. A dosage increase, mixing vaccines, or turning to mRNA technology (the kind used in the highly effective and safe Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines) were all on the table.

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Tim O'Donnell

Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.