China promotes booster shots with variety of vaccine choices

BEIJING - At a vaccination site in Beijing's Chaoyang District, medics are busy preparing inhalable Covid-19 vaccine doses for individuals, who are provided with the option to inhale the needle-free vaccine after it was aerosolised.

"The vaccine tasted a little sweet, which was good for me," said a vaccine recipient, adding that she is afraid of injection and chose the inhalable vaccine as her second booster shot.

The inhalable version is an adenovirus type 5 vector-based vaccine. It has an inhaled dose of 0.1 milliliter, only about a fifth of a traditional intramuscular vaccine dose, and compared with injection, it can induce one more type of immune response -- mucosal immunity.

The inhalable vaccine was approved as a booster shot for people who have been inoculated with two doses of inactivated vaccines for a period of six months or longer. It is among the vaccine types which were approved by the Chinese government for inoculators to get boosted against Covid-19.

As the epidemic continues to rage, China has steadily promoted booster inoculation for the public by providing an increasing number of vaccine types to ensure people's health and safety.

According to the State Council, all vaccines approved for conditional marketing or emergency use can be offered as a second booster dose to certain groups who had received their first booster more than six months ago.

The vaccines include this inhalable vaccine, several injectable recombinant vaccines developed by biotech companies such as CanSino Biologics and Anhui Zhifei Longcom Biopharmaceutical Co., Ltd., and an intranasal vaccine.

The intranasal drug is a live-attenuated influenza vaccine given through the nose. It was jointly developed by Xiamen University, the University of Hong Kong and Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy Enterprise, and has been proven to be safe and effective in human trials. - XINHUA