BERLIN: Berlin has sent its first batch of BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines to China to be administered initially to German expatriates, a German government spokesperson said on Wednesday, the first foreign coronavirus vaccine to be delivered to the country.

No other details were available on the timing and size of the delivery, although the spokesperson said Berlin is pushing for foreigners other than German citizens to be allowed access to the shot if they want it.

The shipment comes after China agreed to allow German nationals in China to get the shot following a deal during Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s visit in Beijing last month, with the German leader pressing for Beijing to allow the shot to be made freely available to Chinese citizens as well. There are about 20,000 German nationals currently in the country. “I can confirm a shipment of the BioNTech vaccine is on its way to China,” the person told journalists in Berlin.

“We are working on the possibility that besides Germans also other foreigners can be vaccinated with BioNTech.” In return, Chinese citizens in Europe can be vaccinated with China’s SinoVac, the spokesperson said.

The comment comes after a report earlier this month that Germany’s health ministry had granted a permit allowing China’s Sinovac Covid-19 vaccine to be imported to Germany to be given to Chinese citizens in that country.

WHO chief ‘very concerned’

The WHO’s director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a briefing on Wednesday the UN agency is concerned by the spike in Covid-19 infections in the world’s No 2 economy. He said the WHO is supporting the government to focus its efforts on vaccinating people at the highest risk across the country.

China has nine domestically developed Covid vaccines approved for use, more than any other country. But none has been updated to target the highly infectious Omicron variant, as Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have for boosters in many developed countries.

Published in Dawn, December 22nd, 2022