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April 30, 2020 – 11:10 a.m. m.
AFP / El País
In a laboratory in northern Beijing, a man perhaps possesses the expected antidote. Dressed in a white coat, he exhibits one of the first experimental vaccines against the new coronavirus.
Sinovac Biotech is one of four Chinese laboratories authorized to undertake clinical trials. Although its vaccine has not yet been tested, the private group says it is ready to produce 100 million doses a year to fight the virus, which appeared in China in late 2019.
The pharmacist can be confident. In 2009, it overtook its competitors and became the first in the world to launch a H1N1 swine flu vaccine.
In their vast facilities in Changping, on the large periphery of the capital, laboratory technicians control the quality of the experimental vaccine, based on inert pathogens, already produced in thousands of copies. And it even has a name: “Coronavac”.
It may interest you: Covid-19 was neither man-made nor genetically modified, says the US.
Monkey Tested
Although the treatment is still far from homologation, the manufacturer must demonstrate that it is capable of producing on a large scale and subjecting lots to the control of the authorities. Hence the launch of production even before the end of clinical trials.
In the midst of the global race to find the long-awaited antidote, less than a dozen laboratories have so far started human trials, according to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Among them, Sinovac, who assures that he obtained promising results in monkeys, before administering his serum for the first time to 144 volunteers in mid-April in Jiangsu (east).
But the laboratory founded in 2001 will not comment on the date on which its half-milliliter injection will possibly be marketed. “It is the question that everyone asks,” acknowledges Liu Peicheng, director of the brand.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the production of a vaccine can take between 12 and 18 months.
Trials abroad
The Chinese laboratory, which employs a thousand employees, expects to obtain the first results on the safety of its product by the end of June, within phase 1 and 2 tests, Meng Wining, director of international relations, told AFP.
These tests consist of verifying that the vaccine is not dangerous for humans. To ensure its effectiveness, a phase 3 trial must be performed on virus carriers.
The problem is that now “only a few cases a day are reported in China,” says Meng. Unless there is a second epidemic wave in China, the group is going to have to test it with positive diagnoses abroad.
“We are currently in contact with several countries in Europe and Asia,” he says. “A phase 3 trial normally involves several thousand people. It is not easy to obtain this figure, in any country,” he warns.
“We don’t waste a minute”
The group undertook in the south of Beijing the construction of a production factory with a capacity of 100 million doses, which should be operational before the end of the year.
“We work day and night, we work three shifts, which means we don’t waste a minute,” says Meng.
Taken to the world population, a possible Sinovac vaccine would not be enough to protect the planet. But Meng says his Nasdaq-listed group is open to “collaborations” with his foreign partners, to whom he sells his flu or hepatitis vaccines.
Being the first to provide a remedy against COVID-19 would be a kind of revenge for China, eager for it to forget that the pandemic arose on its soil.
“We get a lot of support from the Chinese government,” says Meng. “Not a lot of money”, but cooperation with public institutes from which Sinovac obtains viral strains.
Beijing also approved the clinical trial of three other experimental vaccines: one launched by the Military School of Medical Sciences and the CanSino biotechnology group, another by the Institute of Biological Products and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the city where the new coronavirus was born, and the last by the China Biotics group, which started trials on Tuesday among 32 volunteers.
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