Inactivated vaccines agile in tackling new variants, experts say

China's inactivated vaccines against COVID-19 are exceptionally agile at tackling emerging variants and domestic vaccine manufacturers are fully prepared to update their shots, health experts and drugmakers have said.

Shao Yiming, a researcher at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said inactivated vaccines, which deliver a weakened form of virus to stimulate immune responses, are highly suitable for coping with new strains of the virus because most of the manufacturing process does not need to be changed.

"We only need to replace the existing strain found in earlier virus transmission with a mutated strain deemed as a new threat to us," he said.