Poll: Less than 30% of Hong Kong Residents Would Take China’s Coronavirus Vaccine

A University of Hong Kong survey published Thursday revealed a nearly 20-percent drop in interest among Hong Kong residents in receiving any vaccine against the Chinese coronavirus between November and January, and that less than one-third of those living in the city would take a vaccine China developed.

The survey revealed rapidly growing distrust in the city of both Hong Kong officials and their masters in Beijing, a distrust that had initially led to protests in 2019 against a proposed law to allow extraditions into China and culminated in China illegally imposing its laws on the nominally autonomous city.

Under the policy known as “One Country, Two Systems,” the government of Hong Kong cannot legally declare independence from China, and the Chinese Communist Party cannot impose laws passed in Beijing onto Hong Kong, allowing the city to persist as a bastion of free speech and enterprise following the United Kingdom’s surrender of the territory to China in 1997. Last year, in response to the 2019 protests, Beijing passed a “national security” law that allowed the Communist Party to prosecute — and imprison for a minimum of ten years — individuals found guilty of four “crimes”: terrorism, promoting foreign interference in Hong Kong affairs, secession, and “subversion of state power.” While blatantly violating “One Country, Two Systems,” Hong Kong police have enforced the law against some of the city’s most prominent pro-democracy activists.

While the coronavirus pandemic does not have a direct association with the pro-democracy movement, skepticism regarding anything involving China appears to persist in Hong Kong outside of the political.

According to Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK), the survey found only 46 percent of Hong Kong residents said they would be willing to take a vaccine against the Chinese coronavirus. In November, that number was over half of respondents, 63 percent.

Asked specifically if they would be willing to receive several of the available vaccines and vaccine candidates around the world, “CoronaVac,” an experimental vaccine candidate by the Chinese firm Sinovac, received the lowest support of any of the options. Only about 30 percent of people in Hong Kong would trust the Sinovac option.

In contrast, 56 percent of respondents said they were open to taking the vaccine developed by the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer. While tensions between Hong Kong and China may be partially fueling distrust of CoronaVac, the product has also fared significantly worse than the Pfizer vaccine in clinical studies.

The Sao Paulo-based Butantan Institute, which has been conducting Sinovac’s human trials, initially announced it had found CoronaVac was about 78 percent effective, significantly lower than the 95-percent success rate of the Pfizer option. Sinovac then corrected itself and said that its vaccine was actually closer to 50 percent effective.

“When data from all volunteers is considered, including those who contracted ‘very mild’ cases of Covid-19 [Chinese coronavirus] and required no medical assistance, the total efficacy rate falls to 50.38 percent,” the Butantan Institute clarified in mid-January.

The results raised the question globally of whether the Sinovac option was worth taking at all, especially given the limited information on adverse reactions.

The Global Times, a Chinese state propaganda outlet, rapidly declared CoronaVac “good enough.”

“Experts say the result is good enough considering almost all participants in Brazil are high-risk medical workers, and the 77.96 efficacy for mild-case protection means the vaccine can reduce 78 percent of people from needing hospitalization,” the newspaper argued.

Many in Hong Kong appear unconvinced, particularly younger residents, Thursday’s survey results indicated.

“The survey also found that younger people and those with higher education and income levels are less receptive to Covid vaccines,” RTHK noted, highlighting demographics that are also likelier to be sympathetic to the pro-democracy movement in the city.

The head of the University of Hong Kong’s medical school, Gabriel Leung, linked the survey results to the anti-communist sentiments in Hong Kong in remarks to RTHK.

“When you’ve got that kind of chasm in society … that kind of deep mistrust of the authorities following the social unrest, and you have Covid [Chinese coronavirus], we should have been doing much worse than we have done,” Leung said, predicting that rates of trust in vaccines will rise. “So I think that Hong Kong people should really, looking back over the last year, give ourselves a pat on the back. Well done.”

Hong Kong’s government, now fully controlled by China, initially ordered 7.5 million doses of CoronaVac this month and expected them to arrive soon, the Hindustan Times noted. Hong Kong’s population is about 7.5 million people; the vaccine candidate requires two doses. The doses have yet to arrive at press time. At the time, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam said the government had also purchased doses of the Pfizer vaccine and a vaccine candidate by the University of Oxford and European firm Astra-Zeneca.

No widespread vaccination has begun in Hong Kong and the government is facing an accelerating rate of coronavirus cases, resulting in the largest lockdowns in the city since the pandemic began last year. As of Thursday, Hong Kong has documented over 10,000 cases of Chinese coronavirus and 175 deaths. Since last week, however, the government has begun taking aggressive “ambush” lockdown measures, banning residents from leaving their homes in neighborhoods affected by the outbreaks without warning them of any impending limitations to their freedom. On Thursday, RTHK reported that a residential building complex with high rates of positive coronavirus cases awoke in the morning to the reality that they were the target of an “ambush-style” lockdown. Government officials suggested the lockdown would ease by 7 a.m. local time Friday, but opponents argued that not giving residents the chance to stock up on food and other necessities beforehand was dangerous and a violation of their rights.

“If you lock down there overnight, there is nobody to handle the rubbish that has been accumulated for a day. I think the government has to be more considerate on some elderly and children, to let them go through the process in a more comfortable way,” local district representative Lee Yue-shun told RTHK.