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Seoul: China has provided North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his family with an experimental coronavirus vaccine, an American analyst said on Tuesday (December 1), citing two unidentified Japanese intelligence sources.
Harry Kazianis, a North Korea expert at the Center for National Interest think tank in Washington, said the Kims and several top North Korean officials had been vaccinated.
It was unclear which company had supplied the Kims with their drug candidate and whether it had been proven safe, he added.
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“Kim Jong Un and many other high-ranking officials within the Kim family and the leadership network have been vaccinated against coronavirus in the past two to three weeks thanks to a candidate vaccine provided by the Chinese government,” Kazianis wrote in a article for an online medium. 19 forty five.
Citing American medical scientist Peter J Hotez, he said that at least three Chinese companies were developing a coronavirus vaccine, including Sinovac Biotech, CanSinoBio, and Sinophram Group.
Sinophram says its candidate has been used by nearly 1 million people in China, although none of the firms were known to have publicly launched phase 3 clinical trials of their COVID-19 experimental drugs.
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North Korea has not confirmed any coronavirus infections, but the South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS) has said that an outbreak there cannot be ruled out, as the country had trade and person-to-person exchanges with China, the source of the pandemic, before closing. the border at the end of January.
Microsoft said last month that two North Korean hacking groups had tried to break into the network of vaccine developers in various countries, without specifying the target companies. The sources told Reuters they included British drugmaker AstraZeneca.
The NIS said last week that it had thwarted North Korea’s attempts to hack into South Korea’s COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers.
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