There's no reason to expect long term side effects. This isn't the first time we've injected materials intended to make the body make targets for the immune system to go after--it's just in the past they were attenuated viruses. The mRNA and viral-vector Covid vaccines simply distill this to it's essence--making the body produce only the best target rather than whole viruses. Unlike attenuated-virus vaccines there's no risk of producing the actual disease.

It's a matter of face. China isn't going to meekly sit by and buy somebody else's vaccine, they're going to make their own. Never mind that we've never had a vaccine against a coronavirus before because killed-virus vaccines quickly become ineffective. They went ahead and did a killed-virus vaccine--and the real world data seems to show exactly what was expected, it worked well at first but doesn't do much against the variants.

Yup. While the R[sub]0[/sub] was low enough it worked very well. Throw down a ring fence around any infection and they contained it--inconvenient for those caught in the rings but better than the tens of millions that would die without.

The problem is their vaccine does almost nothing against Omicron. They have a population that's basically unprotected--and against that Omicron has about half the fatality rate of the original. Given the hospital crash that would be inevitable that could easily be ten million dead. They have painted themselves into a corner pretty badly at this point.

Key: Super high vaccination rate.