If your cell phone cover, slippers or patio furniture is made in China, it generally isn’t a problem.

We’re not quite sure about the COVID-19 vaccine that’s made in China, but it looks like part of the world is going to find out.

The richer countries of the world are buying most of their COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer and Moderna, which will leave a large part of the world to rely on the Chinese-developed vaccine to manage the pandemic in poorer countries.

There’s just no way of knowing if the Chinese vaccine will work, especially considering that country’s long history of vaccine scandals.

The wealthy nations of the world have reserved 75% of the shots that have been developed in Western countries, or roughly 9 billion of the 12 billion available shots. China has six of its own vaccines in trials of some sort now, and Chinese government officials have said they will have a capacity of 1 billion doses in 2021.

Chinese-developed vaccines have been used in more than a million emergency-use inoculations inside China already, but little is known about the human trials of Chinese vaccines because little has been reported by the Chinese.

Bahrain approved a Chinese COVID-19 vaccine last week and will make that available to its citizens, joining Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. Chinese-made vaccines are awaiting approval in Turkey, Indonesia and Brazil, and testing is being done in Russia, Egypt, Mexico and other countries.

Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro has gone on record with his skepticism about how effective the vaccine from a company in China called Sinovac is, saying he won’t let residents of his country be used as “guinea pigs.”

China has in recent years been able to develop effective vaccines that have worked in stopping outbreaks of measles and hepatitis in China, which some experts believe is a good sign that a Chinese COVID-19 vaccine should be effective and safe.

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