I have a weird thought about China and its COVID-19 vaccines. It’s weird because it doesn’t seem to show “rising in the East and falling in the West,” as Xi Jinping insists.

By the end of February, the US reports over 75 million doses had been administered to our population of about 330 million. China naturally doesn’t provide public data — that might imply some accountability for the Communist Party — but last week indicated 52 million doses administered at the end of February, for a population of about 1.4 billion.

The PRC’s internal inoculation task has always been enormous, so it’s too early to criticize the per capita failing. It’s not too early to wonder why the US is 23 million doses ahead. China started inoculating months earlier, dispensing with some of those annoying clinical trials.

China certainly has the capacity to act urgently against COVID — it’s been bragging about that for a year. It should have the production capacity. The PRC is the world’s top manufacturer, including of chemicals used in pharmaceuticals. It promises two billion vaccine doses this year. While that target is nowhere in sight, it’s unwise to bet against Chinese output for too long.

In fact, China may dramatically accelerate inoculation in the next few months. A goal has been floated to administer 500 million more doses in the next four months or so. It’s not clear this is an official goal but, if it is, it will definitely be reached. Or at least no one will be willing to say otherwise.

Regardless, it’s odd the PRC can anticipate jumping to 25 million doses per week after barely eclipsing 50 million, total. It’s reminiscent of Beijing not reporting COVID testing figures for months, then suddenly being able to test millions of people quickly, once there was little sign of virus spread.

Deepening the mystery: China has rushed to make deals to provide vaccines to foreigners. This is yet another area where the government declines to provide authoritative numbers, but more than 50 countries and 500 million doses seem to be involved over some timeframe.

At this point, you may wonder about timing. If China can
soon leap to 25 million doses per week, that’s still “only” 550 million doses
into July, far short of population size. How long will foreign partners have to
wait for the PRC to produce enough to then inoculate hundreds of millions more
of its own citizens and send hundreds of millions of doses abroad?

It’s well established that China’s current vaccines are inferior to American vaccines and possibly others (see the table here for a summary). Their claimed efficacy is lower, possibly due to use of older technologies. And the data that have been made available on development and evaluation is less complete than for American vaccines. 

In this light, Dan Blumenthal, Linda Zhang, and I have argued there is a window for the US to mostly finish vaccinating our much smaller population, then offer our vaccines to countries that could be waiting quite a while for China’s. There are potentially huge humanitarian and foreign policy gains for the US in doing so.

But there’s another possibility: The PRC continues to slow-play vaccination at home and prioritize exports. The argument could be that China has controlled COVID and can afford to do this strange thing. Despite frightening virus mutations, major holiday travel being largely forbidden last month, and occasional outbreaks continuing to result in spot lockdowns of entire cities.

Most important, any reasonable government should feel
compelled to ensure its own citizens’ health before that of other countries’.
So here’s the weird thought: What if the Communist Party knows China’s current
vaccines are barely worth the vials they’re kept in?

The Party should have access to the efficacy data it won’t let anyone else have. It’s capable of fast action yet has been in no hurry at home and seems willing to ship hundreds of millions of doses overseas, at risk of angering its own people and inducing much-dreaded social instability. This makes sense if it’s shipping out low-quality vaccines while waiting for high-quality vaccines to become available, perhaps even one that is foreign-developed. Of course, the evidence for this can’t possibly be conclusive. But it’s not like this would be China’s first COVID scam. Or second. Or third.

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