When it comes to science, deep technology, and the advancement of human civilization — China has ambitions not just to compete, but to lead. Don’t miss a beat in China’s steady progress in all things science, health, medicine, and deep technology.
The highly transmissible Delta variant of COVID-19, first identified in India, is proving hard to control in Guangzhou. Like with other localized outbreaks over the past year, China is attempting to isolate the virus by testing nearly every resident in the city — 18 million tests in just three days.
In other Chinese vaccine news, Sinovac Biotech becomes the second China-based company to win WHO approval for its shot, and Chinese vaccine makers promise even greater supply for developing countries.
While the dominant origins theory for COVID-19 involves a natural source and no laboratories, the exact way that the pandemic began remains unknown. Some prominent scientists are becoming more skeptical of China’s denials of a lab leak, and want to see more records from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
True to form for the world’s most populous nation, China is now administering eye-popping numbers of COVID-19 vaccinations. In a span of nine days, 100 million people in China recently received a shot.
The successful landing of the Zhurong rover on the Red Planet marks a major milestone in the China National Space Administration’s efforts to catch up to NASA.
Sinopharm’s COVID-19 vaccine is the first Chinese-made shot to ever be approved for emergency use by the World Health Organization. The step affirms China’s growing scientific power, but is expected to have limited impact on vaccine supply in the short term.
The first of 11 launches to construct the Chinese Space Station went ahead without a hitch today. If all goes according to plan, the CSS will be fully operational by the end of 2022.
Gao Fu, the director of China’s CDC, suggested mixing vaccines, adding doses, and looking into mRNA technology to improve the efficacy of COVID-19 shots. He later insisted that he wasn’t “admitting” to a low effectiveness of Chinese vaccines.
With five approved COVID-19 vaccines, China aims to give shots to 40% of its population in the next four months, while also delivering huge amounts of doses to Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico.