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Taiwan – Rich countries are hoarding supplies of COVID-19 vaccines and some regions of the world may depend on drugs developed in China to beat the pandemic. The question is, will they work?
There’s no apparent reason not to think so, but China has had vaccination scandals and its pharmaceutical companies have provided little information, either on their latest human trials or on the more than a million injections they say they’ve already given. of an emergency vaccination plan.
Rich countries have set aside about 9 billion of the 12 billion doses, mostly Western ones, expected to be produced next year, while COVAX, a global initiative to ensure fair access to COVID-19 vaccines, has retained its promised capacity of 2 billion doses not reached.
For countries that do not yet have a vaccine, China may be the only solution.
China has six candidates in the final stages of trials and is one of the few countries that can produce a vaccine on a large scale. Government members announced a billion-dose capacity next year, and President Xi Jinping promised Chinese vaccines would be a boon to the world.
The possibility of millions of people in other countries using its vaccines gives China the opportunity to repair the damage the outbreak has done to its reputation that has escaped its borders, and show the world that it can be an important scientific benchmark .
Past scandals, however, have diminished its own citizens’ confidence in its vaccines, and problems with manufacturing and supply chain cast doubts as to whether it really can be a savior.
“It remains questionable how China can guarantee the delivery of reliable vaccines,” said Joy Zhang, professor of ethics and emerging science at the University of Kent in Britain, pointing to China’s “lack of transparency in scientific data and a checkered record. in the distribution of vaccines ”.
Bahrain became the second country in the world to approve a Chinese COVID-19 vaccine last week, after the United Arab Emirates. Morocco plans to use Chinese vaccines in a massive vaccination campaign that should begin this month. Chinese authorities also waited for a green light in Turkey, Indonesia and Brazil, while trials continued in more than a dozen countries, including Russia, Egypt and Mexico.
In some countries, Chinese vaccines were received with suspicion. The President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, has repeatedly expressed doubts about the effectiveness of the vaccine candidate of the Chinese firm Sinovac, without providing any evidence, and said that the Brazilians would not act as “guinea pigs”.
Many experts praise China’s ability to produce vaccines.
“The studies appear well done,” said Jamie Triccas, chief of immunology and infectious diseases at Sydney Medical School, referring to clinical studies published in scientific journals. “I wouldn’t worry too much about that.”
China has been strengthening its immunization programs for more than a decade. It has produced successful large-scale vaccines for its population, such as those for measles and hepatitis, said Jin Dong-yan, a professor of medicine at the University of Hong Kong.
“There are no major outbreaks of these diseases in China,” he said. “That means the vaccines are safe and effective.”
Over the past decade, China has cooperated with the Gates Foundation and other agencies to improve manufacturing quality. The World Health Organization pre-certified five Chinese vaccines for diseases other than COVID-19, allowing United Nations agencies to purchase them for other countries.
Among the companies that have obtained this pre-certification are Sinovac and the state-owned Sinpharm, both leading developers of vaccines for COVID-19.
However, the Wuhan Biological Products Institute, a Sinopharm-affiliated company developing one of its vaccine candidates for COVID-19, became embroiled in a scandal in 2018.
Government inspectors found that the company, based in the city where the new coronavirus was first discovered next year, had produced hundreds of thousands of ineffective doses of a combined diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine for an equipment failure.
That same year, Changsheng Biotechnology Co. falsified the data on a rabies vaccine.
In 2016, Chinese media revealed that two million doses of different childhood vaccines had been improperly stored and sold across the country for years.
Vaccination coverage has fallen after those scandals.
“All my Chinese friends are skilled, well-to-do workers, and none of them will buy medicines made in China. It is what it is, ”said Ray Yip, former national director of the Gates Foundation in China. He said he was one of the few who did not mind buying manufactured pharmaceutical products there.
China reformed its laws in 2017 and 2019 to tighten its vaccine storage protocol and increase inspections and fines for violations.
The top developers of COVID-19 vaccines in the country have published a number of scientific findings in peer-reviewed scientific journals. But international experts have questioned China’s way of recruiting volunteers, its tracking system to identify potential side effects. The Chinese companies and authorities have not released any details.
Now, after the release of data on the effectiveness of vaccines developed by Western companies Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, experts await the Chinese results. The Emirati regulatory agency, where Sinopharm was tested, has said it appeared to be 86% effective, according to preliminary data from clinical trials. The Turkish government announced on Thursday that Sinovac’s drug is 91.25% effective, according to preliminary data.
Sinopharm did not respond to a request for comment about the vaccine’s effectiveness. Sinovac and CanSino, another Chinese vaccine company, did not respond to requests for interviews.
For some people in countries where the pandemic doesn’t seem to be abating, the country of origin of the vaccine doesn’t matter.
“I plan to attract him, the first to come, if I can,” said Daniel Alves Santos, a chef at a restaurant in Rio de Janeiro. “And I hope God helps.”