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If the vaccines developed by Pfizer Inc., Moderna Inc. and even, it is claimed, Sputnik in Russia, they provide more than 90 percent of the vaccines. protection, Chinese vaccine candidates generally report much lower efficacy results.
A study published Sunday showed that the vaccine developed by Sinovac Biotech Ltd., used in Indonesia and Brazil, was just over 50% effective. a threshold just below the minimum protection threshold that meets the requirements of the world’s leading drug regulators for COVID vaccines. The efficacy of other Chinese vaccines ranges from 66 to 79 percent.
Concerns about such differences were openly voiced over the weekend when George Fu Gao, director of the China Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said it was necessary to somehow address the low efficacy of Chinese vaccines, he reported. local news platform The Paper.
This infrequent recognition of the senior official’s problem spread to the media sooner than it was caught by Chinese censors, who immediately edited or deleted media records and reports of Fu Gao’s comments.
Fu Gao later withdrew, telling the state newspaper The Global Times on Sunday that his comments had been misinterpreted and that only suggestions had been made on how to improve the effectiveness of the vaccines.
At Fu Gao’s suggestion, additional boosters after vaccination and mixing of different types of vaccines could help address the issue of efficacy, The Global Times reported.
Concerns have been expressed about the scale of the global vaccination campaign, especially in the developing world, where wealthier countries rely on Chinese vaccines, such as Turkey and Indonesia, to build up stocks of highly effective mRNA vaccines.
Lack of trust
China, which is also donating vaccines to other countries, is stepping up its own vaccination campaign. Beijing aims to vaccinate 40 percent of the country’s population – or 560 million. people at the end of June; To achieve such an ambitious goal, the population would have to be vaccinated at twice the rate in the United States.
“They don’t really trust him,” said Theresa Hesketh, an expert on the Chinese health care system at University College London. – They were in a rush to make the vaccine and clinical trials have not been adequately tested. From what I know of my colleagues in China, in any case, the so-called vaccinations in China are very pronounced. “
Chinese vaccine developers have been repeatedly criticized for their lack of transparency and are far behind their foreign counterparts in publishing comprehensive clinical data in peer-reviewed medical journals.
Sinovac’s late-stage clinical trial study in Brazil was launched over the weekend, three months after the first efficacy launch, while state-owned Sinopharm has yet to release details of its two phase III clinical trials of COVID vaccines. inactivated.
Although a separate Sinovac study, involving more than 10,000 people in Turkey, showed the vaccine to be 83.5% effective, it only raised additional questions about the effectiveness of the vaccine. The company said different test results at various clinical trial locations were due to several factors: differences in the degree of outbreaks, different circulating strains of COVID, and the accuracy of virus detection.
“The confusion underscores the importance of full transparency in publishing clinical trial results in the peer-reviewed literature,” said Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). .
One of the reasons for the low effectiveness of the vaccine in the studies in Brazil, according to the researchers who presented the study, was that both vaccines were given at short 14-day intervals. The researchers observed a “trend toward greater efficacy” in a limited number of participants who received a second dose of the vaccine no earlier than 21 days later.
In Brazil, where the COVID-19 outbreak is the second largest after the United States, the vaccination campaign faces dangerous challenges.
The country uses both the Sinovac vaccine, known as CoronaVac, and additional boosters against the virus from AstraZeneca Plc. And the University of Oxford. The associated vaccine is also being studied closely after blood clots form in some people who have been vaccinated.
Limited stocks
Dozens of other countries, from Bahrain to Chile to Serbia, have also approved one of the Chinese vaccines, as have vaccines from other manufacturers, although their achievements in fighting the coronavirus vary.
“The most important thing here is that we are in a phase of limited supply of vaccines worldwide,” Kate O’Brien, head of the vaccination department at the World Health Organization (WHO), was asked about vaccines. Chinese during a press conference on Monday. “In the future, we are learning how to make the best use of each of the vaccines.”
China is already balancing on a fine line domestically, trying to catch up with a few other countries in terms of vaccination rates, especially the United States, so as not to delay the lifting of border restrictions and the resumption of international travel. .
While China is working on more effective vaccines, including vaccines based on mRNA technology, it should continue to focus on those that are currently being approved, said Benjamin Cowling, head of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Hong Kong.
“They can provide a high level of protection, especially against severe COVID,” he said.
Fearing that a strict regulatory approach could provoke a backlash, Chinese officials have so far refrained from making vaccination mandatory.
Rather, they attract freebies and put friendly pressure on huge public sector workers in a bid to significantly improve vaccination rates, currently injecting nearly 4 million people. vaccine doses per day compared to less than a million at the beginning of the year.
A threat to China’s vaccine diplomacy
Isn’t it a short phrase uttered by a Chinese scholar ruining the diplomatic work of a second world power for months? This is the question posed by the French publication Le Monde.
Does Gao Fu’s confession call into question China’s vaccine diplomacy?
The problem, according to Le Monde, is so acute that Professor Gao Fu’s words could no longer be found anywhere on Chinese social media last Monday. And on Sunday night, he told the Global Times they didn’t get him: He wasn’t referring to Chinese vaccines, but all vaccines in general.
“The level of protection of vaccines around the world is sometimes high and sometimes low. Strengthening their effectiveness is a challenge for researchers around the world,” he said.
According to the Hong Kong South China Morning Post, Professor Gao Fu, the country’s largest medical authority, said the country was considering two ways to “address the low efficacy of its vaccines”: adjusting the dose by increasing the interval between two injections and even increasing the number of injections, or combining several vaccines produced by different technologies “.
“But if three doses are needed, the deficit of the vaccine and its price will increase, which is two bad news, especially for developing countries,” wrote Frederic Lemaitre in Le Monde. “Will the affected countries turn away from Beijing?”
It won’t necessarily be this way because people will probably think it’s better than nothing and realize that they don’t really have a choice.
The Pfizer vaccine is not available, the Astra Zeneca vaccine is so rare that some countries, even those with difficult relations with China, such as the Philippines, have no choice but to buy Chinese vaccines; Sputnik V is under-produced and India, which exports most of its production, now reserves it for its own population. The WHO initiative, Covax, is progressing very slowly. As a result, China has a very important role to play, although its credibility is declining, “said Jean Pierre Cabestan, a Baptist teacher from Hong Kong.
The diplomatic implications may be negligible, but Professor Gao Fu’s statement raises another problem for China: it questions its scientific capabilities.
“This is proof that they have not yet reached the top in many areas,” Cabestan said.
“More importantly, Gao Fu began to praise matrix-based RNA-based vaccines. According to him, this technology opens up limitless possibilities for medicine. In China, however, this method has been viewed with suspicion until now. In January, the Global Times tried to launch a campaign against Pfizer in which it is used, “wrote the Le Monde journalist.
The New China News Agency reported that a team of researchers from the University of Hong Kong plans to assemble a group of volunteers who agree to be vaccinated with various vaccines.
“They should first be vaccinated with Pfizer and the second dose should be the inactivated SinovacBiotech vaccine. This method is likely to be more effective than vaccination with a single type of vaccine,” the agency said in a statement.
“Commemorating the centenary of the Communist Party of China, President Xi Jinping argued that the advantage of” socialism with Chinese characteristics “was” the search for truth in facts. “In this case, the truth is that the American vaccine Pfizer it is much more effective than Chinese vaccines and that China is lagging behind in terms of the most innovative vaccination technologies ”, analyzes Lemaitre.
“According to the second Chinese principle, one cannot speak of a deterioration of reputation, so China must continue with its diplomacy, which the West often considers aggressive. Both the statements against the international press and the reaction of the Chinese media, condemning the Western media’s misinterpretation of Professor Gao Fu’s speech show that Beijing does not intend to renounce so-called fighting wolf diplomacy, “the publication said.
But it is highly probable that behind the closed door of the official house, such a policy of Xi Jinping will sometimes be rejected by individual internal critics who will try to influence its course or even risk unequivocally criticizing the ‘great leader’ whose name Son reluctant to say, “he concludes. Lemaitre.
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