In other East Asian countries, elderly vaccination rates are much higher. For instance, Japan:
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Singapore doesn't even have enough population to do an assessment of effectiveness of inactivated vaccines to make a reasonable comparison with mRNA. As everyone knew, Singapore from day one has chosen mRNA over inactivated vaccines and most of its researches are bias.
Another population-based ecological study in the context of the prevalence of the Omicron variant strain in Hong Kong showed that the third COVID-19 vaccine provided additional protection to adults, especially those over 60 years old and other high-risk groups. After a third dose is administered to people over 60 years old, the protective effect of preventing severe cases is as high as 88 percent and the protective effect of preventing death cases is as high as 93 percent, according to SINOVAC.
A third case-control study among people over 60 years old in Hong Kong showed that SINOVAC's COVID-19 vaccine can effectively protect the elderly from infection and severe diseases during the domination of the BA.2 strain. Three doses of the vaccine can provide 53.9 percent protection against infection, 86.7 percent protection in preventing COVID-19-related hospitalization, 89.8 percent protection in preventing severe COVID-19 complications, and 95.0 percent protection effective in preventing COVID-19-related death in people aged 80 and above.
How so, China has better vaccination among elderly than most Western nations. Over 92% of Chinese elderly have been vaccinated and over 70% of Chinese elderly have received booster shots which is certainly higher than many countries. MSM is just trying to compare China to Japan and an exceptional few countries that have higher vaccination rate and booster rate.
Compared to Western nations, China has worse elderly vaccination rates. So your assertion is very much false.
As predicted you immediately dismissed the study by questioning Singaporean bias even though there was a certainly a large enough population size and no reason to believe the researchers had any bias. Hong Kong data just corroborate Singaporean data - they essentially say the same thing.
I didn't even mention Taiwan, but if you examine their data you will find a higher rate of deaths compared to Japan, South Korea and highly vaccinated Western countries (not including US). That's because their elderly vaccination rate was also relatively low.
People extrapolating Taiwan's deaths to China arrived at 840,000. This researcher previously predicted the number of Taiwanese deaths:
He has a good explanation of the Chinese cultural problem with elderly vaccination:
Of course, this is not accounting for ICU capacity, which is worse in China. This study from Fudan University funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology does consider that, and arrived at 1.55 million deaths. One of the researchers even has a competing interest from Sinovac.
So why don't you post booster rate for Western countries and compare with China. Last time I checked booster rate for 65 over in the US is around 67% and lower if you included 60 to 65.
Of course it is bias. A few studies that I read from Singapore didn't even bother to breakdown the age of vaccinated population. A few reports even stated that they don't have enough people who vaccinated with inactivated vaccines in certain groups in the disclaimer.
Not really, Hong Kong report has a clear breakdown of 2 doses and 3 doses and age groups and effectiveness of vaccines. Basically after 3 doses, both vaccines don't have much of different in preventing hospitalizations and deaths.
China vaccination rate for 80 or over is 77% not 66%. Your data is outdated. Look, I have strongly advocated for vaccination for elderly. That's the main reason I don't support reopening.
Personally, it is just too early to make any prediction of death tolls. A few months back, I would say over 1 million. However, vaccination rate has greatly improved especially in the last few weeks. It is anyone guess at the moment. There are too many variables that any prediction needs to be constantly updated to be accurate or at least scientifically accurate.
Another outdated assessment. Vaccination rate has increased, ICU capacity has increased, and both are positive for preventing deaths. However, reproduction rate has also been increased which is negative in preventing deaths.
I knew you were going to use those studies.
I'm aware of the studies. Inactivate vaccines need a 3rd dose to be more effective than a 2 dose mRNA vaccine but the JAMA article has many limitations, which they even listed.
My comment on the issue of comorbidities were not addressed by you or the study. It is most likely that those with more comorbidities chose the inactivated vaccine due to its longer experience and are afraid of side effects with mRNA. Also you specifically mentioned deaths in your comment which is disingenuous. They never specified deaths. It was mainly severe disease. You can try to extrapolate but you can't make a definitive comment.
Additionally the mRNA vaccine mainly induced immunity to a specific spike protein. Any changes in that protein in a significant way will render the vaccine less useful as opposed to whole virus vaccines. Lastly mRNA is new technology. No one knows what long term effect it may have on a person. If one is elderly it may it matter as much but for those of us who are young, our risk of death from covid is already low, I would definitely prefer inactivated vaccines.
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Plus, I know personal anecdotes aren't really going to fly, but I'll just keep reiterating that it seems my contacts and everybody who has contacts in China report the same thing, in that the infection is spreading fast, but most people get over it in like 3 days to a week. So Sinovac and Sinopharm did prove their worth in the end. Shouldn't be a surprise, Chinese vaccines already proved their worth in Indonesia, Latin America, Pakistan, and the Middle-East.
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I'm just presenting the raw data from the JHU site as it is.
As to why Bangladesh and Cambodia have had so few deaths for the past months (or a year or so?), that will need a lot more scientific investigation to be done, something which we have still yet to see, at least even only for these 2 countries.
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I'm not going to do all your homework for you. Vaccination rates, not even including the booster, are consistently higher for elderly in Western countries than in China. You can look at Our World in Data or elsewhere. It's widely available information.
I literally just posted updated Chinese vaccination rates for 80 and over from China Daily/NHC as of December. So it's not outdated data. It moved up to 68% for fully vaccinated, leaving 32% with less than 2 doses. That's not much better.
ICU capacity has only recently increased, which most likely largely reflects the raw number of beds and not the actual HCWs needed. China just hasn't trained as many HCWs as its developed peers, and this time they can't be moved around and allocated according to the location of particular outbreaks. Plus the case fatality ratio for the current variant in China (0.16%, similar to that of influenza) was already reached by non-Covid Zero countries when BA.1 and BA.2 were prevalent. As Hong Kong during its BA.2 wave showed, the intrinsic CFR for immuno-naive (no previous infection or vaccination history) is similar to that of the ancestral strain (in Wuhan).
Here's data on mortality. It's consistently lower efficacy for inactivated, which lines up with severity data.
We have neutralization studies (not going to pull all of them up), which show how well vaccines can neutralize variants. They have become an accepted correlate of protection for symptomatic disease (see ). This researcher has conducted many of them with blood from recipients of inactivated vaccines. They don't hold up well against variants. Other researchers haven't found a benefit over mRNA against variants in neutralization either. The T cell/cellular immunity (related to protection against severe disease/death and more durable than B cell/humoral immunity) induced by inactivated vaccines is also not higher than that of mRNA, which again is borne out by real-world data.