KATHMANDU: When China has been pushing the countries under its influence to hurry up to procure China made vaccine, China’s top disease control official has made a rare admission that their vaccine has low effectiveness.

Gao Fu, the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control (CDC), said in a press conference Saturday in the southwestern city of Chendgu that the vaccines that were administered in China do not have very high protection rates hence the government has been considering mixing them to get a boost.

“It’s now under formal consideration whether we should use different vaccines from different technical lines for the immunization process,” Gao added.

China has approved four coronavirus vaccines for home use. But some trials outside of China have shown the vaccine to be less than 50 percent effective.

Chinese officials have rarely acknowledged the effectiveness of their vaccines.

However, CDC chief Gao has commented that his statement was distorted.

More than 100 million people in China have so far received at least one dose of the vaccine. China has been claiming that its vaccine is effective.

As a means of mounting pressure on the people willing to visit or return to China for various purposes, the government has made it mandatory that everyone willing to visit China should be inoculated with Chinese vaccines.

Nepal has started administering Chinese vaccine from April 7 onwards.

However, the Chinese vaccine Vero Cell has got conditional emergency approval for being used in Nepal.

The 800,000 doses of vaccine produced by the Chinese vaccine company Sinopharm had arrived in Nepal on March 29.