Perhaps the biggest news that came out of China yesterday is the shocking admission by a top official (shocking because it was actually admitted) at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention that the Chinese make-vaccines had low efficacy.

This suggests that the vaccines being made in China will provide a weaker protection to the population getting their jabs. In particular, the vaccine being referred to here is SinoVac for which recent results show that vaccine efficacy is lower than 50 percent—below the threshold set by the World Health Organization (WHO).

But this information is not entirely new. That Chinese vaccines will be less effective has been known for a while. Against the more popular Moderna and Pfizer, nearly all of the Chinese vaccines have lower efficacy—with the latter two’s protection rate trailing 95 percent. However, the latest findings—for efficacy dropping below 50 percent—is certainly fresh information.

This should be disconcerting news for the 500,000 folks in Pakistan who have already been inoculated with the Chinese vaccines. But more worryingly, people who have received these vaccines happen to be the most vulnerable to the virus as they constitute of mostly people above 60 and those working in the healthcare industry and have to be in close quarters with patients and potential virus transmitters. Another bad news is that there is very little data on SinoPharm, the vaccine that made its debut in Pakistan in March. Few studies have been done to calculate how well it would perform against the virus.

Strategies to optimize the Chinese vaccines according to the official include changing the number of doses and the length of time between doses—based on data collected, the vaccine efficacy improves if the length of time between the doses is increased by longer than three weeks.

The other vaccine that Pakistan will receive is AstraZaneca which has been making news as well in relation to its potentially dangerous side-effects. At this point, the vaccines coming into Pakistan—including the CanSino vaccine with an efficacy rate of 65.7 percent are not the best protection that people in Pakistan are being offered. Though, Cansino has its advantages being a one-shot vaccine. It does not have very high storage requirements and can bypass many distribution hurdles on account of it being a single jab.

However, in terms of protection alone, all hopes may now rest on SputNik which is being imported into Pakistan but is facing a host of supply side issues. As the government grapples with the impossible task of inoculating the population—and may fail to do so completely—it must also now think about which vaccines are the better bet. One thing is for sure, the vaccination program needs planning.