1.9 Billion Fully Vaccinated in China. Only 170 Million in US
by John Lawrence
About 70% of the Chinese people have been vaccinated. There have been 94,631 cases and 4,636 coronavirus-related deaths reported in China since the pandemic began. In the US there have been 37,744,654 cases and 628,000 deaths. About 170 million people or 51 percent of the total U.S. population, have now been fully vaccinated. China developed its own vaccines which are now being used in other mainly poor countries. Nature.com reported:
"The World Health Organization (WHO) has authorized the first of China’s COVID-19 vaccines for emergency use, and another could be listed in the coming days, opening the door to wide distribution in lower-income nations through the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) initiative.
"The listing will boost global confidence in these vaccines, say scientists. China's five different vaccines have not been used widely in wealthy nations, but are already sustaining immunization campaigns in the global south.
“There is big demand for the Chinese vaccines,” says Firdausi Qadri, an immunologist at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, in Dhaka.
"The first vaccine to be listed is made in Beijing by Chinese state-owned firm Sinopharm. The other under review — named CoronaVac — is produced by private company Sinovac, also based in Beijing. Five COVID-19 vaccines are already authorized by the WHO, but unlike these, the Chinese ones use inactivated virus and are not widely used in Western nations.
"Sinopharm and Sinovac’s vaccines account for the bulk of shots given in China, which has so far inoculated 243 million people. More than 45 countries have already approved their use, but the WHO is among the first stringent regulatory authorities to review the data."
The Chinese vaccines, which use inactivated virus and not the newer mRNA technology used in western vaccines, are not quite as effective as the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Yet they are sufficiently effective to ward off the virus and are much more available to the rest of the world. Because China has effectively contained the virus compared to the US, China is surging ahead economically and also with respect to winning friends in the rest of the world. CNN reported:
"Since China curbed its initial outbreak, the ruling Communist Party has held up the country's effective containment efforts as proof of the supposed superiority of its authoritarian political system. The success of its zero-Covid strategy is hailed as an ideological and moral victory over the faltering response of the US and other Western democracies, which had struggled to control surging cases and deaths."
China has made rapid strides in bringing its people out of poverty and into a middle class lifestyle. Since 1980 China has lifted about 800 million people out of poverty. It has done this by becoming a capitalist nation under Communist party leadership which seems like a contradiction in terms! China's version of capitalism is state capitalism while the US version is shareholder capitalism. In the US companies are only beholden to their shareholders; in China companies are ultimately beholden to the Chinese state. The Chinese communist party has its fingers in every capitalist pie so to speak.And their model, which is being exported to other Asian countries, is working. According to some measures, 2020 was the first time in 2 centuries that Asian GDP, as a share of world GDP at purchasing power parity, was higher than that of the rest of the world.
