CORONAVIRUS vaccine shots will be ready for public use as early as November or December in China, said the country’s top bio-safety scientist this week.

Final stage clinical trials of several vaccine candidates have progressed very smoothly, said Wu Guizhen, chief bio-safety expert at Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in an interview with State television Monday evening. She herself took a vaccine shot in April and has felt “nothing abnormal.”

Two coronavirus vaccine production plants in China have received regulatory approval, while a third one is undergoing appraisal, said Wu.

China has four of the nine vaccine candidates that have progressed to final-stage trials in the race for immunization against COVID-19. Its experimental shots have moved rapidly, even as Western frontrunner Astrazeneca Plc last week paused its trial of a shot developed with Oxford University due to a volunteer falling ill. The U.K.-based drugmaker has resumed trials in most countries.

Meanwhile, China’s top medical official said that not everyone in the country will need to get vaccinated against COVID-19, as the government looks to prioritize frontline workers and high-risk populations in a move that underscores rising confidence among policy-makers of their ability to contain the virus.

“Since the first wave of COVID-19 appeared in Wuhan, China has already survived the impact of COVID-19 several times,” CDC director Gao Fu said at a vaccine summit in Shenzhen on Saturday, according to China News Service.

The question of vaccinating the public was one of balancing “risks and benefits,” he added, pointing to factors like cost and potential side effects. There isn’t currently a need for mass vaccination at this stage — though that could change if another serious outbreak takes place, Gao said.

The policy marks China apart from many Western governments, most notably Australia, that have outlined plans to introduce mass public vaccination drives.

China’s reported virus numbers have stayed low since the spring. There have been a few flare-ups — clusters in the northeastern Jilin Province in May, an outbreak in Beijing in June, and another in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi in July — but these were met with immediate lockdown measures and mass testing, and the outbreaks were contained within a few weeks.

Any potential vaccine would be prioritized for those on the front lines, Gao added: medical workers, Chinese nationals working overseas in virus hostpots, and people working in dense, high-risk environments like restaurants, schools or cleaning services.

(SD-Agencies)