They have enough vaccines, they just can't persuade their vulnerable population to take it. Old people in particular don't trust modern medicine and don't trust the government.

You know how some old people believe all sorts of conspiracy theories about the government? Because their government was actually evil during their lifetime, it becomes much harder for them to believe that this one time the government really does want to give them medicine for their own good.

Would't an actual evil government simply let the old population die and solve the demographics crisis? It's not like they depend on old peoples votes to stay in power.

I have relatives in Bulgaria, a country with full access to all western vaccines thanks to EU but is among the least vaccinated countries in the world and among the top deaths of COVID-19 per capita.

I was shocked when I visited Bulgaria once travel become possible. Everyone knew someone dead but they also were telling stories about this one person who went to get a vaccine and their veins turned blue and died shaking. People in villages were tellings tories how Bill Gates will monitor them or that the virus and the younger ones were saying that the vaccines are a sham and the governments orchestrated it to reduce the population(Bulgaria is also a top country in population decline, the government and EU are actually trying very hard to increase the population).

When people want to believe things, they believe things.

> Would't an actual evil government simply let the old population die and solve the demographics crisis? It's not like they depend on old peoples votes to stay in power.

The CCP may not be the Kiwanis Club but they're not the Legion of Doom either. It's not a democracy but they still need some degree of popular support, and letting everyone's grandparents die is not a great way to engender it.

What I find hard to believe here is that the Chinese government seems very capable of locking down people (i.e. more or less forcing them to stay inside, with patrols and mandatory tests etc.) but somehow they are unable to force those same people to get vaccinated?

You'd think that with China's cavalier attitude towards intellectual property and trade secrets they would just copy one of the more effective mRNA vaccines and distribute it under the current Sinovax label.

There's probably a lot of know how in the form of trade secrets on top of patents. And in any case, merely copying what's in the patents does not help you as far as certifications are concerned, it's almost impossible to get the exact same end product, and who knows how that turns out once injected.

There's also the russian vaccine, it seems a little better .. considering the context they could have made a deal to buy some..

In any case there are multiple paths available and so far they seem stuck on the failing one. It's strange.

i do wonder how easy/hard it really is to reverse engineer a vaccine - and if it went wrong, some heads will roll. It's not like software piracy, where a perfect copy could be made.

I think the "code" of the vaccines is pretty much open. It is the production line, that is complicated and hard to set up, if you want to achieve some quality vaccines.

China had an unfortunate event where people were poorly reverse engineering baby formula so they poisoned a bunch of their own kids.

People in China are still posted about that.

>i do wonder how easy/hard it really is to reverse engineer a vaccine

I think it's easier to gain this information via hacking and data theft or paying insiders for documents than actually reversing the vaccine.

I think it's a combination of not enough Western production, no possibility of acquiring a local production license like India and the hit to their public image if they admit their vaccine isn't good enough. The current largest producer of mRNA vaccines is India, AFAIK, and most of that goes to India and the EU.