China claims to have administered 100 million vaccines in just five days

If Australia’s sluggish vaccine rate didn’t look bad already, China has just claimed to have administered an eye-wateringly high number of jabs in record time.

China has reportedly vaccinated 100 million people in five days. Picture: Justin Tallis/AFP

If you want feel even more uneasy about Australia’s sluggish vaccine rollout, take a look at China.

In the last 24 hours, around 57,000 Australians received a jab; in total 4.6 million people have received either the AstraZeneca or Pfizer shot.

Yet China claims to have reached an extraordinary milestone of vaccinating 100 million people in just five days.

In total, 700 million vaccine doses have been put into arms in China, half of those in May. Chinese officials have said they now expect to have 80 per cent of the population of 1.4 billon vaccinated by October.

It’s an impressive total and it puts China into the top tier of vaccinated nations with around 50 per cent of people having at least one dose.

However, per population it is still behind the vaccine leaders of the US, Hungary, Chile, Bahrain, Canada and the UK according to website Our World in Data. Israel is top of the table with 63 per cent of its residents now having had at least one dose and 59 per cent fully vaccinated.

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China claims to have vaccinated 100 million people in just five days. Picture: STR/AFP

China’s neighbour Mongolia is also ahead with 57 per cent of its locals having had one jab with some of those receiving the Chinese Sinopharm inoculation.

Overall, China claims to now be administering 19 million shots countrywide per day. That’s up from three million per day just a few weeks ago.

The massive ramp up in China’s vaccine program has been aided by a huge network of places where people can get the shot.

Companies have offered jabs to employees, you can get jabs in shopping centres and mobile vaccine vans are parked in neighbourhoods.

Production of the two domestic vaccines – Sinopharm and Sinovac – have also been increased.

“The Communist Party has people all the way down to every village, every neighbourhood,” Ray Yip, former country director for the Gates Foundation in China and a public health expert, told the Associated Press.

“That’s the draconian part of the system, but it also gives very powerful mobilisation.”

However, its still unclear how many Chinese people have had the two shots need for more effective protection from Covid-19 because the government does not release full data.

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A man has his second dose of China’s Sinovac Covid-19 coronavirus vaccine. Picture: Romeo Gacad/AFP

Rollout of vaccine in China not even

The information that is available states the capital Beijing is China’s most vaxxed region with 87 per cent of people having had a jab.

But rates across the rest of the country are patchier, reported AP.

“I started lining up that day at 9 in the morning, until 6pm, only then did I get the shot. It was exhausting,” Zhou Hongxia, a resident of Lanzhou, in north western Gansu province, said.

“When I left, there were still people waiting.”

China’s recent vaccination surge, like in Australia, has also been helped by recent outbreaks as people rush to get the jab.

Authorities have locked down parts of the southern city of Guangzhou after cases jumped from the single digits to 23 on Monday. The cases were of the more infectious Delta Indian variant, the one that has now been identified in a small number of Melbourne cases.

While most of the city’s seven million residents are not in lockdown, most have been barred from leaving the city on public transport. Restaurants have all moved to takeaway only.

An outbreak in Taiwan, which has been relatively Covid-free throughout the entire pandemic, has also caused alarm.

China is certainly doing a better job of vaccinating than Japan, just over the South China Sea.

Just 8 per cent of people in Japan have received a jab with 3 per cent getting both shots.

The sluggish vaccination rates are casting a shadow over the Tokyo Olympics which are due to begin on July 23.