My understanding is that the additional piece of the jigsaw is the refusal to import more effective vaccines as it would reflect poorly on Sinovax and the prounouncements around it. No idea how significant this aspect is but I thought it was worth mentioning for completelness.
The vaccines in use in China are already highly effective. The best data on this comes from Hong Kong, which uses both Pfizer/Biontech and Sinovac. Three doses of either vaccine is roughly equally effective at preventing death.
The problem isn't what vaccines they're using. The problem is that many old people don't want to get vaccinated, period.
No usages of Sinovac outside of china call it effective, and even china itself accidently loose lipped called it ineffective. The best data does not come from Hong Kong as its still China, it can be fudged and censored.
Are you suggesting that Prof. Ben Cowling,[0] a highly respected epidemiologist, is publishing "fudged and censored" data? This sort of conspiratorial thinking with regards to China is really getting out of hand.
The reason the best numbers come out of Hong Kong is because Hong Kong uses both Sinovac and Biontech/Pfizer, and had an Omicron outbreak earlier this year.
Pre-Omicron, there were plenty of studies of Chinese vaccines (there are several of them, using different technologies) conducted in other countries. In fact, all the phase-3 studies were conducted outside of China, because you can't determine real-world efficacy of a vaccine if the virus isn't spreading in society. The various Chinese vaccines generally had similar efficacy as the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine.
