China has properly vaccinated more than one billion individuals against the coronavirus, according to government numbers released on Thursday. This represents 71 percent of the country’s population.
The country where the virus was initially discovered has mostly contained the outbreak within its borders, but it is racing to vaccinate the vast majority of its population as a new outbreak flares up in the southeast.
At a press conference, National Health Commission spokeswoman Mi Feng stated, “As of September 15, 2.16 billion vaccination doses have been administered nationally.”
Late last month, Chinese health officials announced that 890 million individuals had been fully vaccinated, with two billion doses administered.
The government has not set a target for vaccination coverage, but chief virologist Zhong Nanshan stated last month that the country is on track to reach herd immunity by the end of the year, with 80 percent of the population immunized.
In China’s south-eastern province of Fujian, an outbreak of the Delta variety has infected over 200 people in three cities, with dozens of them being kids.
The Fujian cluster is the largest in weeks, and it comes after China declared the Delta type under control, putting China’s “zero-case” approach to the pandemic to the test.
On Thursday, China recorded 49 new domestic transmissions, the vast majority of which were in Fujian.
