Chinese health officials have vaccinated more than half of China’s population of 1.4 billion against the Chinese coronavirus, the National Health Commission (NHC) of the People’s Republic of China claimed Friday.

“More than 777 million Chinese — more than half of the Chinese population – have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus],” the NHC reported in a progress update issued August 13.

“A total of 1.83 billion COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] vaccine doses have been administrated in the Chinese mainland,” NHC spokesperson Mi Feng said at a press briefing Friday.

The NHC has administered “more than 60 million” Chinese coronavirus doses to “young people aged 12 to 17,” according to senior NHC official He Qinghua.

The NHC used Chinese state-made coronavirus vaccine candidates in its drive to inoculate over half of China’s population against the Chinese coronavirus. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has approved the following seven state-made vaccine candidates for use in the country over the past year and a half: Sinopharm, Sinovac-CoronaVac, Convidecia, Sinopharm-WIBP, Zifivax, Minhai, and the “Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences COVID-19 vaccine.”

The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) grants Chinese coronavirus vaccine candidates emergency use authorization for demonstrating an efficacy rate of just 50 percent against the disease. The low standard has allowed the W.H.O. to confer two of China’s seven vaccine candidates, Sinopharm and Sinovac-CoronaVac, emergency use authorization. China’s Sinovac vaccine candidate is just 50.38 percent effective against the Chinese coronavirus, according to full data from late-stage clinical trials released in January.

China boasted of its high vaccine rate against the Chinese coronavirus on Friday as the NHC continued to fail to contain the country’s latest domestic outbreak of the disease, first publicly identified on July 20 in eastern China’s Jiangsu province and soon spreading nationwide.

“Over 1,282 domestically transmitted cases [of the Chinese coronavirus] have been reported in 48 cities in 18 provinces as of Thursday [August 12] in the latest wave of outbreak,” senior NHC official He Qinhua said at Friday’s press briefing.

The Jiangsu province city of Yangzhou reported 37 new “locally transmitted” infections of the Chinese coronavirus as of August 11, increasing the city’s caseload from its latest outbreak of the disease to 485.

“Of the total of 485 patients reported so far, 37 were severe or critical patients,” Wang Jingsong, the deputy director of a local health department in Yangzhou, said at a press conference on August 12.

Local CCP officials upgraded “several more areas” of Yangzhou to “at high-risk” for the Chinese coronavirus on August 12 after the city reported two additional new cases of the disease.