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The city government said on Saturday that five fully vaccinated workers tested positive for COVID-19 at Shanghai International Airport in China.
Zhong Nanshan, a top epidemiologist in China, said the vaccine’s effectiveness against this variant would decline six months after the first dose.
The city’s Pudong International Airport recorded two cases on Friday, with both Chinese and Ethiopians in their 40s. Authorities immediately blocked the neighborhood where the two lived.
The local government then conducted an overnight test in an attempt to stop the new outbreak and found three more cases on Saturday. According to an online post, some residents woke up at 3 am to test their nucleic acids.
Five are freight workers at the city’s airport, tracking cases of nurses in a local hospital who tested positive on Wednesday, but are fully vaccinated.
All of these cases were from the vaccination priority group.
Highly infectious delta mutants have been detected in more than 12 cities in China since late July.
Due to the spread of the latest strains of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, the busiest Chinese airport has stopped all freight transport, including international freight and cargo unloading, since Friday afternoon.
Shanghai has tested tens of thousands of locals by Saturday morning. This includes close secondary contact with five airport workers.
Vaccine efficiency
China’s top epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan said on Friday that the effectiveness of vaccines against variants, including those made in China such as Sinovac, declined six months later.
He denied that the first shot failed, but suggested that a third dose would be needed to boost immunity.
In early August, Zhong claimed that the Chinese vaccine provided 100% protection against death and admission to the intensive care unit.
However, countries that have more than half of their population vaccinated primarily with Chinese vaccines do not believe that new infections are expected to decrease. Chile, a country that depends on China’s vaccine, announced on August 5 that it would administer booster shots to recipients of the Sinovac vaccine.
Studies in this country found that the vaccine was less effective than Pfizer and AstraZeneca, and was less effective in preventing symptomatic disease months after vaccination.
China has not confirmed whether to administer foreign vaccines as a booster shot of a fully vaccinated population.
According to the National Health Commission, the national number of newly confirmed cases on Saturday was 32. China also reported 19 new asymptomatic CCP virus cases that were not classified as confirmed infections.
Rita Lee is a reporter for The Epoch Times, focusing on topics related to China. She started writing the Chinese version in 2018.
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