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- China approved its first coronavirus vaccine for home use.
- Conditional approval has been given to a vaccine developed by Sinopharm, controlled by the state, which claims a 79% efficacy but has not released key details.
- China wants to vaccinate 50 million people by mid-February, The New York Times reported.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
China has granted conditional approval to its first general home-use vaccine against COVID-19, although its launch may be clouded by questions about the lack of publicly disclosed efficacy data.
The injection was developed by the state pharmaceutical company Sinopharm, which announced on Wednesday a 79% efficacy for the vaccine. That’s less than the efficacy of Western vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which boasted late-stage trial efficacy rates of 95% and 94% respectively.
While the 79% figure is still well above the level that experts around the world have deemed acceptable, Reuters noted inconsistencies between that number and findings in other countries. The same vaccine has been approved by Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, which announced an 86% efficacy rate for it. According to the Financial Times, there has been no public explanation for the discrepancy, and neither Sinopharm, Bahrain, nor the UAE regulators have released details of their analysis.
“We have not yet seen key details, such as the number of trial participants and infections in the phase 3 trials of the vaccine,” Dong-Yan Jin, a professor at Hong University’s College of Biomedical Sciences, told Reuters. Kong.
He added that Chinese regulators would have access to such information, saying: “If the vaccine wants to take a share in the global market, especially in developed countries, more data is needed. If the vaccine can get approval in the United States, o European Union, where regulatory barriers are higher than in China and the United Arab Emirates, more people would trust it. “
China was the epicenter of the initial coronavirus outbreak earlier in the year. Tight closures and other restrictions have helped keep the nation’s known death toll at just 4,781 and infections below 96,000, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The global death toll exceeds 1.8 million.
Announcing conditional approval on Thursday, Chen Shifei, deputy commissioner of the China National Medical Products Administration, said that “the known benefits of Sinopharm’s new inactivated coronavirus vaccine are greater than the known and potential risks.”
China has already vaccinated more than 1 million workers with jabs authorized for emergency use, but it faces a great challenge in inoculating the bulk of its 1.3 billion people. According to The New York Times, China wants to vaccinate 50 million people by February, when millions of people are expected to travel to celebrate the Lunar New Year.
China plans to focus its first round of vaccines on those in front-line positions, officials said, including medical personnel and those working in public places. A second phase is expected to begin in the spring.
