As COVID 19 spread from Wuhan to the world, countries around the world were in fierce competition to develop a vaccine. In June, China made high profile claims that it had made significant progress in vaccine deployment, but so far, there is still a lack of confidence in the vaccines that China has pushed forward due to the lack of data transparency and effectiveness.
Recently after China Kexing Biosciences abruptly delayed the release of the COVID 19 vaccine test results, Watson Bio announced that it will start producing 120-200 million doses of mRNA vaccine in 2021, even though the vaccine is still in the clinical trial I stage. A former official of China Red Cross criticized the premature release of the vaccine. He said that after Pfizer and Mederna successfully launched the COVID vaccine, China has been under pressure to introduce its own version. He accused China of disregarding the potential risk and of using the general public for human trials instead.
Another report that Caixin published showed that there are a number of other pharmaceutical companies involved in vaccine manufacturing. A couple of them were close to finishing the clinical trial stage III but had to delay the release of trial data due to a deficiency in trial results. For the vaccines that have been approved, there are restrictions imposed on who can receive the vaccine. According to an official notice issued by Qingyan City of Gansu province, the age group of the vaccine recipients is limited to 18-59 and to those with no chronicle illness. The same restriction was applied to the vaccines sold in the United Arab Emirates.
Source: Radio Free Asia, December 28, 2020
https://www.rfa.org/cantonese/news/vaccine-12282020054255.html