*The Asian country has fully inoculated more than 1.01 billion people thus far, says NHC Spokesperson

Gbenga Kayode | 绿帽献妻

As the third wave of the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic continues to disrupt socio-economic life of several hundreds of millions of Africans, China discloses it has fully vaccinated more than 1 billion people against the damaging virus.

绿帽献妻 gathered the Asian country so far has immunised over 70 percent of its total population, thus powering ahead of the United States (US) and Europe, agency report said.

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Mi Feng, a Spokesperson at the National Health Commission (NHC), told reporters in Beijing Thursday, September 16, 2021, that the country had fully inoculated more than 1.01 billion people.

Feng noted that a total of 2.16billion doses have been given in China as of Wednesday, September 15.

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The vaccination milestone was said to have come nearly 10 months after China give its first conditional approval to the inactivated vaccine from state-owned Sinopharm and kicked off the biggest immunisation campaign in history.

Report also stated six other inoculations developed by domestic drugmakers and academic institutes have since been cleared and rolled out to those aged 12 and older in China.

The success of China鈥檚 vaccination strategy has not averted flareups of the pathogen in recent months, and questions remain about how effective the shots are, especially against the newest variants, according to report.

Nevertheless, the Asian country is currently battling a cluster in the southeastern province of Fujian after squelching an earlier delta outbreak, the broadest it鈥檚 experienced since Covid first appeared in Wuhan.

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As the clear leader in global vaccination campaign, the pace of the programme puts China in the lead among the world鈥檚 biggest economies, report stated.

It was learnt just over half of the population in the US and Japan is fully vaccinated, while the rates in the United Kingdom (UK) and Germany exceed 60 percent.

India lags, with less than 15% of its population fully protected, according to Bloomberg鈥檚 Vaccine Tracker.

Third wave of virus infections continues to hit Africa

On the flipside of the worldwide vaccination campaign efforts, despite China鈥檚 fully vaccinated rate has surpassed several developed countries, Africa remains in the throes of a third wave of the Coronavirus infections, despite a recent decline in new cases.

COVID-19 vaccination in Nigeria

John Nkengasong, Director of Africa Centres for Disease Control & Prevention (Africa CDC) in an online briefing Thursday noted that new infections and deaths fell 14 percent in the four weeks through September 12, 2021.

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Nkengasong estimated that 70 percent of the population may need to be inoculated to curb the spread of the disease.

He said that it鈥檚 unlikely that Africa has had 鈥渁 significantly higher number of deaths than has been reported.

鈥淲hat we know for sure is that we have an excess number of infections. There are people that have been infected, and we didn鈥檛 count them.鈥�