They could have vaccinated their population while they were maintaining zero-COVID. It's a mystery to me why they didn't make vaccination mandatory.

Sinovac, Sinopharm, etc that China made weren't working up to the required standards. It wasn't something anyone wanted to come out and admit.

To make vaccination mandatory they'd have to admit, kill off their own producers and import. It'd be a political disaster.

Their vaccines weren't great but mandating them would have been a lot better than nothing.

It could actually have been a lot worse than nothing. Compare covid deaths in Japan and Korea prior to the mRNA vaccine rollout in 2021 to afterwards; afterwards the infection and death rates sky-rocketed.

That particular anti-vax theory doesn't hold water when you consider that New Zealand vaccinated almost everyone with mRNA (Pfizer) prior to COVID spreading widely, with excellent results. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1085... NZ cumulative excess mortality since January 2020 is still negative: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-mortali...

For the people? Not for the politicians and executives. Any stats that show the vaccines as performing worse than the competition would hurt sales.

Sinovac was something terrible like 50-62% efficacy. While also not provably stopping transmission. The spread would have continued and there was no evidence it would have reduced the burden on hospitals. It would definitely be worse for people.

The reason PRC never said it publicly is because that would have been terrible for them politically as well.