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

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.

The comments were noteworthy for a couple of reasons. For one, it was quite simply a "rare admission" from Beijing, The Associated Press writes. But, more importantly, China has already exported hundreds of millions of doses of two vaccines developed by Chinese drug makers, Sinovac and Sinopharm, to dozens of countries, including Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, Hungary, and Brazil. So, this could turn into a global predicament.

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Now, though, Gao is telling Chinese state media that the reaction to his remarks "was a complete misunderstanding" and that he was really just suggesting that the question of how to improve vaccines' effectiveness is one "that needs to be considered by scientists around the world" because of the novelty of the virus. He did not, however, specifically address protection levels of the Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines.