‘Acceptable’ for Chinese COVID-19 vaccine to be 50 percent effective – DOST

MANILA – The reported 50 percent efficacy of China’s Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine is “acceptable” as this is the minimum requirement for its use, the Department of Science and Technology said on Thursday.

A newspaper in Brazil, where late-stage trials of the Sinovac vaccine are underway, reported that the drug was more than 50% effective. The vaccine is among those the Philippines plans to purchase for vaccines here.

“The 50 percent efficacy is acceptable because that is the minimum requirement set by the World Health Organization for the country to use a vaccine,” said Jaime Montoya, executive director of the DOST-Philippine Council for Health Research and Development.

“We must also bear in mind that the efficacy of the vaccine can change, it can increase or decrease, since more and more people use it when they are implemented,” he said.

The reported efficacy is for participants “in general” and could be higher “if we really divide them into groups,” he said.

“Maybe it’s more effective in a particular group of people, maybe in healthcare workers, maybe in the elderly, maybe with those with coexisting morbidity, so we have to look at them,” Montoya said. “So we also have to look at where they are going to be most useful, in which group, before we can make a decision.”

“Until such time as the native data (that we review) is not reviewed, we cannot draw any conclusions,” he added.

Other candidate vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, which reported efficacy of 95 and 94.5 percent, respectively, have been granted emergency use authorization (US) in the United States, Montoya said.

“If they are going to continue their application here in the Philippines for the USA … then malamang sila ang mauuna maging (they will probably be the first to be) available,” he said.

“If we are given a choice and we have to prioritize, of course, definitely the efficacy of the vaccine [that] the greater the preferred vaccine would be ”, added the official.

The Philippines, which has counted some 464,000 coronavirus infections, is considering 4 vaccines for use in the first quarter of 2021, including Russia’s Gamaleya Institute and China’s Sinovac, Sinopharm and CanSino.