China Starts Vaccinating Children as Young as 3 Amid New Surge of COVID-19 Cases

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Children as young as 3 years old will now be receiving vaccine doses in China as the country battles what Beijing has described as “rapidly developing” local COVID-19 clusters.

City and provincial authorities in at least seven provinces have issued notices in recent days requiring children between three and 11 years old to be inoculated, widening China’s vaccination campaign as the regime looks to lock down cities and mass quarantine those suspected of carrying the virus.

“All who should get vaccinated will get vaccinated,” some of the government announcements read.

The new rules place China among a handful of countries with the lowest age limits for vaccination, alongside the United Arab Emirates that rolled out China’s Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine for children aged 3 to 17, and Cuba, which started giving shots to children from two years old last month.

The United States is now planning a large-scale rollout of COVID-19 vaccines for children aged five years and older.

With only about 100 days left before the Beijing is set to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, the regime has given the promise for a “safe and splendid” games while aggressively pushing ahead with its “zero tolerance” COVID-19 policy. Its heavily restrictive containment measures have caused analysts to warn that they could negatively impact China’s already weakening economy.

The virus has continued to spread in China even as over 76 percent of the population in China has been fully vaccinated.

Over the past week, clusters of infections have emerged in around a dozen provinces, and the outbreak is still at risk of expanding, Mi Feng, a spokesperson for National Health Commission, said in an Oct. 24 press conference.

Shijiazhuang, a provincial capital near Beijing, in recent days quarantined nearly 2,000 people after reports of one case, while mobilizing thousands of medical staff to search for potential infections. Tens of thousands of locals in some parts of the country’s northern Inner Mongolia region are now confined to their homes, with officials threatening criminal prosecution for violators.

China in June approved the emergency use of two inactivated vaccines by Sinovac and Beijing Institute of Biological Products, Sinopharm’s research institute in Beijing, on those aged 3 to 17. In August, it approved a third from Sinopharm’s Wuhan affiliate on the same age group.

A resident receives the Sinopharm Covid-19 vaccine in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province on Oct. 14, 2021. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

These vaccines, however, are still under clinical trials and there has been no definitive answer to their protection levels against the Delta variant currently driving the country’s sporadic outbreaks.

Chinese authorities have also faced accusations of hushing up reports of deaths of individuals occurring shortly after they took Chinese-made vaccines.

Jiang Yanhong, a mother in Henan Province of central China, took her 12-year-old daughter to be vaccinated on Aug. 10 evening. Two days later, the girl began experiencing a high fever with over a dozen complications. She passed away on Aug. 28.

Believing that she lost her child because of the vaccine, Jiang then petitioned to local and national officials, but the local National Health Commission in Nanle county, where she lives, sent people to beat her, she previously told The Epoch Times. Nanle county’s police detained her on Oct. 16 for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” an umbrella charge typically used against dissidents, according to a detention notice provided to The Epoch Times.

A child undergoes a nucleic acid test for the COVID-19 in Xiamen, southern China’s Fujian Province on Sept. 14, 2021. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

Yang Xiaoming, the CEO of Sinopharm’s subsidiary, China National Biotec Group, told state media in July that the overall data suggest a high safety rate for the vaccines, but did not disclose the data.

Sinovac started an efficacy trial with 14,000 child participants across multiple countries in September. Its approval in China was based on smaller phase 1 and phase 2 trials. Sinopharm’s Beijing shot was also approved based on smaller phase 1 and phase 2 trials.

Wang Lu, who lives in the southern city of Fuzhou in Fujian Province, said she isn’t in a rush to get her 3-year-old son vaccinated.

“I’m just not very clear on the vaccine’s safety profile, so I don’t really want to get him vaccinated. At the very least, I don’t want to be the first,” Wang said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.