China's top health authorities on Sunday urged local authorities to halt mandatory vaccination orders as some cities were reportedly found to adopt compulsory measures to meet the country's goal of vaccinating 560 million people by June.
Officials and experts said the instances were rare and do not reflect the big picture, but it reveals management problems in some local governments that need to be alert. They stressed that the country's principle is to encourage those in need to get vaccinated while respecting their wishes.
The recent mass inoculation plans have been carried out in two key sectors. The first aims to ensure mass vaccination in potential high risk areas such as port cities, border areas and metropolises where epidemic outbreaks have occurred, and the second covers key worker groups including cold-chain workers, medics, governments and institutions, schools, supermarkets and logistics, Wu Liangyou, deputy head of the National Health Commission (NHC)'s disease control bureau, told a press conference on Sunday.
China is taking an approach of "getting the people who need it vaccinated and pushing forward vaccination in stages," and as of Saturday, the country had administered 164.47 million jabs, making it the second-fastest country in the world in terms of mass vaccination, according to the press conference.
According to estimates from disease control experts, vaccination coverage would need to reach 70 to 80 percent of a population for herd immunity, which in China means about 900 million to 1 billion people would need to be vaccinated.