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BEIJING: With rich countries sourcing supplies of COVID-19 vaccines, some parts of the world may have to rely on vaccines developed in China to try to beat the outbreak. The question: Will they work?
There’s no external reason to believe they won’t, but China has a history of vaccine scandals, and its drug makers have revealed little about their final human trials and the more than 1 million emergency-use inoculations that, they say they have been carried out within the country. country already.
READ: Turkey says China’s Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine is 91.25% effective in latest trials
Rich nations have booked around 9 billion of the 12 billion injections developed primarily in the West that are expected to occur next year, while COVAX, a global effort to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines, it has not reached its promised capacity of 2 billion doses. .
For those countries that have not yet obtained a vaccine, China may be the only solution.
China has six candidates in the last stage of trials and is one of the few nations that can manufacture vaccines on a large scale. Government officials have announced a billion-dose capacity next year, and President Xi Jinping has promised that China’s vaccines will be a boon to the world.
The potential use of its vaccine by millions of people in other countries gives China the opportunity both to repair the damage to its reputation by an outbreak that escaped its borders and to show the world that it can be a major scientific player.
However, past scandals have damaged its own citizens’ confidence in its vaccines, and manufacturing and supply chain issues cast doubt on whether it can really be a savior.
“There remains a question mark on how China can ensure the delivery of reliable vaccines,” said Joy Zhang, a professor studying emerging science ethics at the University of Kent in Britain.
He cited “China’s lack of transparency about scientific data and a troubled history with vaccine delivery.”
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Last week, Bahrain became the second country to approve a Chinese COVID-19 vaccine, joining the United Arab Emirates. Morocco plans to use Chinese vaccines in a mass immunization campaign scheduled to begin this month.
Chinese vaccines are also awaiting approval in Turkey, Indonesia and Brazil, while testing continues in more than a dozen countries, including Russia, Egypt and Mexico.
In some countries, Chinese vaccines are viewed with suspicion.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has repeatedly cast doubt on the effectiveness of the Chinese company Sinovac’s candidate vaccine without citing any evidence, saying that Brazilians will not be used as “guinea pigs.”
Many experts praise China’s vaccine capabilities.
“The studies seem to be well done,” said Jamie Triccas, director of immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Sydney School of Medicine, referring to the results of clinical trials published in scientific journals.
“I wouldn’t be too worried about that.”
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China has been developing its immunization programs for more than a decade. It has produced successful large-scale vaccines for its own population, including vaccines against measles and hepatitis, said Jin Dong-yan, a professor of medicine at the University of Hong Kong.
“There are no major outbreaks in China for any of these diseases,” he said. “That means the vaccines are safe and effective.”
China has worked with the Gates Foundation and others to improve manufacturing quality in the past decade. The World Health Organization has prequalified five Chinese vaccines that are not COVID-19, allowing UN agencies to purchase them for other countries.
Companies whose products were prequalified include Sinovac and state-owned Sinopharm, both leaders in COVID-19 vaccine development.
However, the Wuhan Biological Products Institute, a Sinopharm subsidiary behind one of the COVID-19 candidates, was embroiled in a vaccine scandal in 2018.
Government inspectors found that the company, based in the city where the coronavirus was first detected last year, had produced hundreds of thousands of ineffective doses of a combination vaccine for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis due to equipment malfunction.
That same year, it was reported that Changsheng Biotechnology Co falsified data on a rabies vaccine.
In 2016, Chinese media revealed that 2 million doses of various children’s vaccines had been improperly stored and sold across the country for years.
Vaccination rates fell after those scandals.
“All my local Chinese friends are white-collar, well-off, and none of them will buy Chinese-made medicine. That’s the way it is, ”said Ray Yip, former country director of the Gates Foundation in China.
He said he is one of the few who does not mind buying pharmaceuticals made in China.
China revised its laws in 2017 and 2019 to strengthen vaccine storage management and intensify inspections and penalties for defective vaccines.
The country’s top COVID-19 vaccine developers have published some scientific findings in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
READ: China will begin to open the COVID-19 vaccination program to the general public
But international experts questioned how China recruited volunteers and what kind of monitoring there was to detect possible side effects. Chinese companies and government officials have not released details.
Now, after the release of data on the effectiveness of western-made vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna, experts are hoping to see the Chinese results.
Regulators in the United Arab Emirates, where a Sinopharm vaccine was tested, have said it appeared to be 86% effective based on interim clinical trial data. On Thursday, the Turkish government announced that Sinovac is 91.25 percent effective based on provisional data.
Sinopharm did not respond to a request for comment on the vaccine’s efficacy data. Sinovac and CanSino, another Chinese vaccine company, did not respond to requests for interviews.
For some people in countries where the pandemic shows no signs of abating, the country of origin of the vaccine does not matter.
“I propose to take it, the first one that comes, if it goes well,” said Daniel Alves Santos, a chef at a restaurant in Rio de Janeiro. “And I hope God helps.”
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