The Chinese vaccines work about half the time: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-55642648
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-sinovac-covid-19-vaccine-is-50-4-in-late-stage-brazil-trials-11610470581
Wouldn’t bet my money (or my life) on any product out of China. Buy American.
The interesting point is that the CCP didn't even try to do a sub-unit (e.g., S-protein targeting) vax. They certainly could have gone that route if they wanted to.
It is not surprising that the CCP whole virus vaxs are less effective. Coronaviruses are big and complex which can make it harder in general to get a whole virus vax working.
In contrast, sub-unit vaccines are designed to target a specific feature or characteristic of a pathogen -- in SARS2 the spike protein is targeted.
There are tradeoffs with using sub-unit vaxs that the CCP certainly considered. Including that it may be easier for pathogens to mutate to avoid/defeat the narrowly targeted sub-unit vaccines.
Also, there are some plausible theories that using sub-unit vaxs in the middle of a raging pandemic accelerates the mutations and could lead to "blinding" the vaccinated immune systems to the mutated virus. One immunologist suggests we are doing a global 'gain-of-function' experiment.
I don't understand his theory enough to repeat it here, but one comment struck me. He said if you wanted to rapidly evolve/mutate SARS2 into something more dangerous (e.g., gain-of-function), this is exactly how he would do it.