China is trying to navigate its biggest COVID-19 outbreak without a tool that it could have adopted months ago, the kind of vaccines that have proven to offer the best protection against the worst coronavirus outcomes.
As early as the spring of 2020, a Chinese pharmaceutical company, Fosun Pharma, reached an agreement to distribute and eventually manufacture the mRNA vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech. It still has not been cleared in mainland China, despite being authorized for use by separate authorities in Hong Kong and Macau.
Now health experts say that the delay a result of putting politics