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Some serious credible citations needed for that apparent hogwash.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33884644/
here are a couple studies showing that covid can cause immune system deregulation effects.
there are plenty more if you go and look.
even mild cases have been shown to cause last impact to the immune system.
There are several preprints that speculate this immune system deregulation is partially responsible for the abrupt spike in rsv and flu happening.
It is also true that COVID can weaken your general immune system.
But that doesn’t mean that getting COVID won’t increase your immunity against a future COVID infection, temporarily at least, just the way the effectiveness of the vaccine is temporary.
You just described positive feedback loop. If that would be case, everyone on this planet would be already dead.
There is some evidence that long covid, affecting about 7.5% of those who get covid, is the result of a suppressed immune system [example refs below].
There's a lot of anecdotal discussion about a possible larger effect and there is ongoing research to try and determine if there has been any effect on this year's northern hemisphere flu numbers from the effects of coronavirus infection, social isolation or vaccinations but there is no conclusion yet.
More variants is a concern but seeing how corona has been allowed to run free around the rest of the world it's unfair to single out China here. The rest of the world is busy producing new variants, which are reacting to the local vaccines and becoming better at evading protection. China has different vaccines, so likely to produce variants that avoid those vaccines, which have never been good enough to begin with. Anywhere in the world might produce a variant with better spread than Omnicron and also more severe disease.
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j... https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.30.21261234v... https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...
It's time we retire this media talking point which is based on severe distortion of the data and frankly prejudice. Research shows that 3-dose Sinovac is about just as effective as 3-dose Pfizer with the original Omicron against severe illness and death.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Neither Pfizer) nor Sinovac are very good against preventing spread. And also, for both, the boosters' main protection only last for a few months, which is why we now live in a "booster subscription reality".
Furthermore, the BF.1 and BQ.1 variants dominant in China are mutations that evade existing immunity again meaning that neither Pfizer (even the bivalent one or Sinovac are very good against current variants.
Chinese also have had fewer boosts than western countries because there was no need to. Whereas here we recommend people to get boosted every few months, in China many people had their last dose a year ago. This also plays a major factor in immunity that's not related to whether the vaccines themselves work or not.
The media narrative of "Chinese vaccines don't work" was based on the worst-case data in some early trials (efficacy depends on context) against the original strain, and the media and the public just kept latching on that idea without looking at other data and without recognizing that Omicron is also defeating Pfizer.
The "Chinese vaccines don't work" narrative is in part based on an apple-orange comparison. Articles compared Sinovac's efficacy against spread (which, admittedly, is lower than mRNA's) with Pfizer's efficacy against severe illness/death, all against the original variant. Furthermore, the phase where we had any sort of decent protection against spread was short-lived, no matter which vaccine, so keeping up this narrative that's based on a flawed and outdated premise is either disingenuous or ignorant.
Regardless, unless they are large and well conducted systemic reviews, single articles and studies are not enough to represent reality or for either of us to derive conclusions. Good science is slow, much slower than needed for policy decisions.
Agreed on more research being needed. But the opposite also holds: concluding that Chinese vaccines don't work, especially when such conclusion is usually used to support the implicit thesis that "our vaccines work great and they're in this mess because they didn't use ours", is also irresponsible.
2. There was initially not enough capacity to supply mRNA to the entire world. Huge parts of Africa, South-east Asia and India didn't have any vaccines for a long time, or could only get Chinese vaccines. Why would China choose to be at the mercy of western companies? Don't people here talk too about supply chain risk and reducing reliance on China? Why is self-reliance only a good thing when we do it?
3. Inactivated vaccines don't require ultra cold chains. Rural areas of China lag behind in development. The label "developing country" actually means something.
4. Does the US accept Chinese vaccines? They have fewer side effects.