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BEIJING (BLOOMBERG) – Western politicians have blamed China for initial delays in providing information as the coronavirus spreads around the world. Now that Beijing is developing a vaccine, the need for transparency is critical to rebuilding trust.
American pharmaceutical company Pfizer Inc and German biotechnology firm BioNTech SE announced this week that their vaccine appears to be more than 90 percent effective in stopping Covid-19 infections. The preliminary finding spurred a global stock market rally and put companies ahead of the pack in the race for the vaccine.
At around the same time, China saw the final stage of the trial of one of its main vaccine candidates stopped in Brazil due to a serious adverse event. While Brazil reversed its decision in less than 48 hours, the episode underscored the tense geopolitical tensions surrounding vaccine development: Last month, President Jair Bolsonaro said China lacks credibility and that people would not feel safe with the vaccine “due to its origin”.
“As China continues to push its own vaccines through the final stage of the clinical trial amid the Pfizer announcement, the need for Beijing to address public perception of its vaccine safety issues is more urgent than ever,” Xiaoqing said Lu Boynton. consultant at Albright Stonebridge Group focusing on health and life sciences.
For China, the stakes are high in developing a successful vaccine after a year in which the outbreak in Wuhan further shaken relations with the United States, Europe, India and Australia. While Beijing quickly brought the virus under control and tried to distribute aid to other countries, complaints about defective materials and ties followed.
Since then, the race to develop a vaccine has become a way for China to show the world its technological superiority, as the Trump administration urges countries around the world to avoid Chinese companies for 5G networks, computer chips. and large infrastructure projects.
Widely distributing it would also help China regain some of its lost soft power: President Xi Jinping vowed that Chinese-developed vaccines will be a global “public good,” joining a World Health Organization-backed effort to vaccinate all against Covid-19.
‘PUBLIC GOOD OF CHINA’
The “problem for me is the global public good or the public good of China; they are two different notions,” said Nicolas Chapuis, European Union ambassador to China.
While he praised China’s decision to join the WHO-backed vaccine program, he said many questions remain about international distribution, pricing and certification.
“To be certified you have to give samples,” he said. “No samples have been given.”
China has promised to prioritize the supply of doses to more than 60 countries, including governments that have received infrastructure loans under Xi’s Belt and Road initiative.
Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Morocco have formal agreements with China’s major vaccine manufacturers, and Latin American and Caribbean countries have been promised a $ 1 billion (Singapore $ 1.3 billion) loan to purchase doses from them.
Still, China’s setback in Brazil combined with Pfizer’s advance “puts China’s vaccine diplomacy in jeopardy,” said Dr. Yongwook Ryu, assistant professor of East Asian international relations at the Lee Kuan School of Public Policy. Yew of the National University of Singapore.
‘LACK OF TRANSPARENCY’
“The problem is the lack of transparency,” said Dr. Ryu. “So the right thing for the Chinese government to do is make the results of its tests and related information public, so that experts can examine them.”
China has already administered the vaccine, including that from Sinovac Biotech, whose trial was just stopped in Brazil, to hundreds of thousands of people under an expansive program of emergency use.
But none of the Chinese leaders has released preliminary data from phase 3 trials like Pfizer has. Brazil’s health regulator will send a mission to China this month to inspect the facilities of some companies involved in the production of vaccines.
Officials at China’s Foreign Ministry praised the country’s vaccine progress over the past week, saying safety was of the utmost importance. Vice Foreign Minister Luo Zhaohui said China was “in a fairly leading position in the world,” while spokesman Wang Wenbin said Thursday that the country’s vaccine program “has been praised by many countries.”
Chinese companies could still emerge as leaders in vaccine distribution: Inactivated vaccines would be easier to distribute in poorer countries than Pfizer’s double injection, which requires expensive networks of production, storage and transportation of deep-frozen.
The setback in Brazil could reinforce the notion that China is serious about its vaccine safety, according to Yanzhong Huang, senior global health researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“It is still too early to say that the United States has won the race,” he said.
However, for the time being, Asian governments are reaching out to Pfizer to secure the vaccine and learn from the company. Pfizer’s results “have given hope” to many research programs using similar technology, Nakorn Premsri, director of the National Vaccine Institute of Thailand, said in a briefing Tuesday.
‘EXAGGERATED DEMAND’
Even China is coming on board. Its drug regulator accepted a request from national pharmaceutical company Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group Co for a bridge test that would pave the way for the Pfizer vaccine to be approved in China. Fosun said it could spend tens of millions of yuan to build the cold chain logistics needed to store and supply the injection in China.
With the rise in vaccine nationalism, it is very important that Chinese companies publish all their data and submit it to peer review, said Dr. Nicholas Thomas, associate professor of public health at the City University of Hong Kong.
“If the world is going to trust a Chinese vaccine, then the information will have to be transparent,” he said.
Yet even then, it can still be difficult to get China’s adversaries to accept the vaccine. In India, where delivering vaccines to more than a billion people will be a challenge no matter where it comes from, public anger with China is the highest in recent memory after a deadly border standoff that has dragged on for months.
“Cooperation will be difficult given current levels of trust,” said Biren Nanda, a former Indian ambassador who spent a decade in China.
“When not only India, but even other nations, it seems they cannot trust China with their work on our telecommunications and electronic systems, it would be a difficult task to expect confidence in a Chinese vaccine.”
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