US warns Beijing it can’t control Covid-19 without western jabs
Beijing will be unable to control the spread of Covid-19 unless it imports foreign-made vaccines that are more effective than Chinese-made jabs, Joe Biden’s coronavirus tsar has warned.
Ashish Jha, who runs the US coronavirus response, said in an interview at a conference organised by the FT and the Commonwealth Fund that all the empirical evidence suggests Chinese-made Covid vaccines are “not as good” as mRNA shots made by Moderna, BioNTech and Pfizer.
Other Covid vaccines based on different technologies developed in the UK and elsewhere, such as the University of Oxford-AstraZeneca jab, are also superior to vaccines made in China, he added.
Eric Topol, the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said there was strong evidence that a mix and match of the Chinese vaccines with a western-made mRNA booster provides more protection than three or four Sinovac or Sinopharm shots.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Jamie Smyth
