Local city and provincial-level governments in at least five provinces have issued notices in recent days announcing that children aged 3-11 will be required to receive vaccinations.
Children under the age of 3 will begin receiving vaccines for COVID-19 in China, where 76% of the population has been fully vaccinated and officials are maintaining it. Zero tolerance policy towards outbreaks.
Local city and provincial-level governments in at least five provinces have issued notices in recent days announcing that children aged 3-11 will be required to receive vaccinations.
The expansion of the vaccination campaign comes as new clampdown measures are in place in parts of China to try to stamp out smaller outbreaks. The northwestern province of Gansu, heavily dependent on tourism, closed all tourist sites on Monday after new COVID-19 cases were detected. Residents of parts of Inner Mongolia have been ordered to stay indoors due to the outbreak.
The National Health Commission reported that 35 new cases of local transmission have been detected in the last 24 hours, of which four are in Gansu. Another 19 cases were found in the Inner Mongolia region, while others were scattered across the country.
China has employed lockdowns, quarantines and mandatory testing for the virus throughout the pandemic and has stampeded out cases of local infection, fully vaccinating 1.07 billion people in a population of 1.4 billion.
In particular, the government is concerned about the spread of the more infectious Delta variant by travelers and mass vaccination ahead of the Beijing Olympics in February. Foreign spectators have already been banned from the Games, and participants will have to live in a bubble separating them from those outside.
China’s most widely used vaccines, from SinoPharma and Sinovac, have been effective in preventing serious illness and transmission of the virus, based on public data. But the protection they provide against the Delta version hasn’t been definitively answered, although officials say they remain protective.
Hubei, Fujian and Hainan provinces all issued provincial-level notices warning of new vaccination requirements, while separate cities in Zhejiang province and Hunan province have issued similar announcements.
China in June approved two vaccines — Sinofarm from the Beijing Institute of Biological Products and Sinovac — for children ages 3-17, but it is vaccinating only for children 12 and older. In August, regulators approved another, Sinopharm, from the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products.
After vaccines for children in China received domestic approval, foreign governments began injecting children in their own countries. Cambodia uses both Sinovac and Sinoform shots in children 6-11. Regulators in Chile approved Sinovac for children under the age of 6. In Argentina, regulators approved the Sinoform vaccine for children under the age of 3.
Many developing countries dropped out of the race to get shots from Western pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and Moderna that bought Chinese vaccines. China has shipped more than 1.2 billion doses as of September, according to its foreign ministry.
Even with widespread domestic and global use, not every parent is convinced about the vaccine, citing less publicly available data on the shots.
Wang Lu, who lives in Fuzhou, a southern city in Fujian province, said she was not in particularly rushing to get her 3-year-old son vaccinated. Ms. Wang said, “I’m not very clear on the safety profile of the vaccine, so I really don’t want her to be vaccinated, at least, I don’t want to be the first.”
Sinovac began an efficacy trial in September with 14,000 child participants in several countries. Its approval in China was based on smaller Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials. Sinopharm’s seeding shot was also approved based on smaller Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials. These were later published in peer-reviewed journals.
Other parents said they weren’t worried, noting that many others had already received the shot.
Wu Kang, a mother of 7 years old, said her daughter’s school in Shanghai has yet to inform her about any vaccinations.
“I think it’s not much different from the flu vaccine, a lot of people have already been vaccinated, so I don’t worry too much,” Ms. Wu said.
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