China has administered 2 billion Covid vaccine shots. But coercive measures are sparking anger – CNN

As of Thursday, more than 889 million people had been fully vaccinated, with more than two billion shots of domestically-produced Covid-19 administered in total, an official at the National Health Commission said at a press conference Friday. That puts China on par with the United Kingdom and ahead of the United States in terms of the percentage of its population that are now fully vaccinated.

China's latest inoculation campaign has targeted the elderly, minors and residents in the country's vast rural areas hard to reach groups that had not been covered in earlier vaccination rounds.

Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the discrepancy between central government policy and its local implementation is a typical occurrence in China's top down political system, where provincial officials are placed under tremendous pressure to meet policy targets set by Beijing.

"Failure to fulfill these targets will lead to penalization, creating this incentive for local government officials to undertake heavy-handed measures to get things done," he said.

Zhong, the top respiratory expert, said China could establish "effective herd immunity" when the vaccination rate hits 80%.

But Huang with the Council on Foreign Relations said he remained skeptical, given the lower efficacy rates of Chinese vaccines and the surge of Delta variant breakthrough infections across the world.

At the press conference Friday, Zheng Zhongwei, an official at the NHC, said experts at the agency recommend high-risk groups, such as workers at customs, airports and quarantine sites, to be given a booster shot six months after they've been fully vaccinated.

On Monday, state broadcaster CCTV warned the pandemic has not ended and that people shouldn't become careless in epidemic prevention.

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China has administered 2 billion Covid vaccine shots. But coercive measures are sparking anger - CNN