BEIJING -- As of Friday, over 200 million senior citizens in China have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, a health official said on Saturday.

He Qinghua, a senior official with the National Health Commission, said at a press conference that as of Friday, over 2.96 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses had been administered on the Chinese mainland.

More than 1.22 billion people have been fully vaccinated, with 209 million of that number being elderly people aged 60 or above, the official said.