TAIPEI - After exporting COVID-19 vaccines to almost 70 countries, China is gearing up to push for its own vaccine passport to ease entry to foreigners and foreign residents of China inoculated with China-made vaccines.
Beijing hopes the vaccine passport will be an incentive for businesspeople, including Taiwanese citizens who travel frequently to and from China, to get Beijing-approved jabs. But many eligible for the program worry about the lower efficacy of Sinopharm and vaccines compared with that of vaccines made outside China, and they feel pressured to use Chinese vaccines to obtain entry to China.
The Sinovac vaccine's efficacy rate is slightly higher than 50%, while the Sinopharm vaccine's efficacy rate is 79%, far lower than that of Moderna, Pfizer and even the Russian-made Sputnik vaccine, all of which are above 90%, according to a Bloomberg report citing experimental data from researchers outside China.
China launched full-scale registration of China-made vaccines for foreigners in Beijing and Shanghai at the end of March. Similar provincial-level programs began in April for foreigners concentrated in the cities of Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Hangzhou and Chongqing.
In addition, the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council announced on April 14 that Taiwanese citizens who live in China will be allowed to register for a vaccination at their places of residence using their residence permits or a certificate of Chinese health insurance coverage.
Before the current push, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs had announced as of March 15 that further "visa facilitation" would be provided to foreign nationals inoculated with China-made vaccines. However, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at that day's .
that visitors to China would still need to have negative results from both nucleic acid tests and serology tests before boarding a flight to China. After entering China, the visitors would be required to check in for weeks-long quarantine at a government-designated hotel at their own expense.
Zhao also said that China is willing to undertake mutual recognition of vaccinations with other countries. But he declined to comment on whether China would consider accepting and facilitating the WHO-approved Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines in the future. Zhao did not mention the Moderna vaccine.
Anticipating that the vaccine passport will lead to further relaxation of travel restrictions, Vincent Hsu, a Taiwanese citizen who does business in China, said that he and many of his counterparts are open to getting the China-made vaccines.
Hsu told VOA Mandarin, "Because we can get vaccine passports, even if the passports do not apply to the whole world, at least we don't have to quarantine in China. I think that is the biggest incentive. A lot of people want to get vaccinated."
However, due to doubts about the safety and efficacy of China-made vaccines, Hsu said many of his foreign friends in China are willing to pay for the option of getting non-Chinese-made vaccines once they are available in China.
Three Westerners who live in China who were unwilling to reveal their names for fear of upsetting authorities told VOA Mandarin that they were holding off on getting Chinese vaccines and hoping other options would become available soon.
An American citizen told VOA Mandarin that he might wait for a truly quarantine-free vaccine passport to be introduced before considering getting vaccinated. He hoped that China and the U.S. would have mutual recognition of vaccines as soon as possible.
All the Westerners told VOA Mandarin that traveling without quarantine restrictions would be an incentive for businesspeople to obtain Chinese-made vaccines.
She added she would evaluate the safety and efficacy of any vaccine before getting inoculated. She said she preferred to wait for Beijing to import the Pfizer vaccine and would then pay for the shots herself. She added that she was in no hurry to get inoculated because of the lack of data on all the vaccines.
In China, Hong Kong is the only region that offers vaccines from both Pfizer and Sinovac. But after a month of vaccinations, Chief Executive Carrie Lam said last week that only about 500,000 people, or 7.5% of Hong Kong's population, have been vaccinated, half of them with Chinese-made Sinovac doses.
According to from the Hong Kong Department of Health, as of April 16, 16 people have died after being vaccinated. Of those, 14 died after being inoculated with Sinovac vaccines. The other two people died after getting the Pfizer vaccine. The Sinovac number includes older people for whom vaccinations were not recommended.