The government should offer elderly residents of care homes the BioNTech vaccine against Covid-19 instead of the one made by Sinovac so as to better protect them, a patients’ concern group in Hong Kong has suggested.

The Patients and Healthcare Professionals Rights Association on Sunday said people who received two jabs of the German-made BioNTech within the span of 21 days had more effective protection against the virus in a shorter span of time than those who received three doses of the Chinese-manufactured Sinovac spaced over four months.

Association convenor Dr Jeffrey Pong Chiu-fai argued the government should supply BioNTech shots to the care home residents unless they or their families refused to give consent.

“It’s important to encourage the elderly to complete the vaccination schedule as quickly as possible for a proper immunity,” he said, adding that decreasing infection numbers did not mean residents could let down their guard.

An elderly person is helped at a community vaccination centre in Tsing Yi.

Numbers could jump in the coming weeks, he warned, pointing to the approaching Easter holiday and the expected easing of social-distance measures on April 21.

“Vaccination is still the key as the elderly homes can’t be restricted on the visiting arrangement in the long run,” he added.

Meanwhile, the vice-president of the Hong Kong Society of Infectious Diseases, Dr Wilson Lam, called on people to get inoculated even as the fifth wave of infections was tapering off.

“I would expect the sixth wave to be around in Hong Kong maybe in six to nine months’ time, because by then we would have lost some of our antibodies,” he said.

The city should learn from the experience of New Zealand, which adapted to a similar “zero-Covid” strategy, to encourage the elderly to complete basic vaccinations, he added.

Hong Kong has witnessed four times more elderly deaths than what New Zealand did due to the city’s relatively low inoculation rate before the Omicron outbreak began.

As of Friday, only 52 per cent of those aged 60 or above had received two doses of the BioNTech vaccine or three doses of the Sinovac one.

“The government should educate more elderly residents to get jabs as it benefits themselves,” Lam said.

He also urged the government to allow the elderly who took Sinovac as their first dose to choose BioNTech as the second.

“Some of them might not have had a choice but to take Sinovac when the BioNTech vaccine was in huge demand when the fifth wave just came to the city,” he said.

Lam noted that the side effects of the two vaccines were similar based on current scientific data.

As of Saturday, about 80 per cent of the population, or 5.9 million people, had received two doses of a Covid-19 vaccine.

Among them, 3.4 million residents chose Sinovac, while 2.5 million people preferred BioNTech.

The proportion of residents aged 60 or above who had received two doses stood at 74.39 per cent, while the rate for those aged 80 or above was 46.99 per.