HK People Should Get China Covid Jabs: Wuhan Doctor

A Wuhan doctor who was among the first to be infected with Covid-19 a year ago has called on Hong Kong people to put politics aside and take China-made vaccines, even as he accused mainland authorities of trying to cover up the pandemic at its onset.

In an interview with RTHK, Yu Changping, a member of a Covid-19 expert team in Hubei province, said authorities there "made some mistakes" when they failed to notify people of new infections in January last year.

Yu, 54, said that since the coronavirus was a new disease, it was not clear at the time how it was spreading, and mistakes were made because there were limits in terms of studying the virus at the beginning.

The respiratory disease specialist at the Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University said he did not know how or when he contracted the virus, but he saw some patients on January 8, 2020 and then started to experience symptoms.

Yu was admitted to hospital on January 17 and his condition quickly deteriorated. He eventually stayed in hospital for five weeks before his health slowly improved.

The mainland's top medical expert Zhong Nanshan made an announcement on January 20, 2020 that Covid-19 was spreading between people, but Yu said he and his colleagues knew about this some time before.

"If it wasn't spreading among people, why would so many people come to see the doctor? There were patients everywhere, so it was certainly spreading from human to human. It was just that words of ordinary people could not travel far," he said.

Yu said that frontline medics should have been able to directly report cases to Beijing via an infectious disease notification system set up after the Sars outbreak in 2003, but the system became a mere formality.

"I mentioned about the direct reporting system on Weibo, but this content was screened out... China's self-media is well-developed and people are free to speak, but there are some topics you should be careful about," he said.

Yu said he has now been inoculated against the virus with a vaccine manufactured on the mainland. He said Hong Kong people should also get China jabs, saying these are "more reliable" traditional inactivated virus vaccines, unlike vaccines developed by overseas drug manufacturers using more modern techniques.

"One has to promote political ideologies, but I feel there is too much of it. When it comes to fighting a pandemic and curing diseases ... there is too much politics," he said.

"Hong Kong people should get the mainland-made vaccines, because they are inactivated. They are made in a traditional way. Overseas RNA vaccines are made with new technologies, and there are a lot of uncertainties," he said.

The doctor also said that in the later stages of the outbreak, China performed well and was able to contain the virus in a short time.

He expressed confidence that China would not experience another massive outbreak, saying the government and the people now have the experience and the ability to control the situation.