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The city of Shanghai on Tuesday began dispensing aerosolized booster shots for China’s woefully ineffective coronavirus vaccine products, a technique meant to make booster doses faster and more palatable to the population than traditional injection methods.
The system being field-tested in Shanghai asks subjects to breathe deeply from a cloud of medicated gas contained in what looks like a sippy cup.
China’s vaccine candidates, initially produced by Sinopharm and Sinovac, were developed using older “inactive virus” technology instead of the mRNA tech used by the major Western vaccine products. Despite copious promises from Chinese Communist politicians and dubious clinical studies, these products proved substantially less effective than Western vaccine candidates in the field, which is one reason the authoritarian country wound up with relatively low compliance rates despite strong official encouragement for citizens to get their shots.
China’s pandemic response is oppressive in most respects, but one aspect in which Beijing could claim to be less authoritarian than many governments in the free world is that it has not mandated vaccine product compliance.
Chinese Communist leaders began admitting some of these deficiencies recently to justify their continuing use of brutal district and citywide lockdowns to contain coronavirus surges.
The regime continued to urge citizens to get shots, however, and is attempting to produce mRNA vaccine products that might be more effective than the older products. Some outside analysts think the Chinese government is growing increasingly fervent for vaccination and boosters because its lockdown policies left its vast population with far less natural immunity to Chinese coronavirus than other large countries, leaving China stuck with seemingly endless coronavirus surges and lockdowns while the rest of the world moves on from the pandemic.
