TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) – With wealthy countries pulling in supplies of COVID-19 vaccines, some parts of the world may need to rely on Chinese-developed shots to try to overcome the outbreak. The question: will they work?
There is no outright reason to believe they will not, but China has a history of vaccination scandals, and drug manufacturers have revealed little about their latest human trials and the more than 1 million emergency vaccinations they believe are in the U.S. to be executed. country already.
Rich countries have reserved about 9 billion of the 12 billion mostly Western-developed shots expected to be produced next year, while COVAX, a global effort to ensure equal access to COVID-19 vaccines, is lagging behind i ts promised a capacity of 2 billion doses.
For those countries that have not yet received 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 vaccines on a large scale. Government officials have announced a 1 billion dose capacity next year, with President Xi Jinping vowing that China’s vaccines will be a boon to the world.
The potential use of its vaccine by millions in other countries gives China the opportunity to both repair damage to its reputation from an outbreak that escaped its borders and show the world that it can be a major scientific player .
Still, past scandals have damaged the confidence of its own citizens in its vaccines, and manufacturing and supply chain issues cast doubts as to whether it really can be a savior.
“It remains a question of how China can guarantee the delivery of reliable vaccines,” said Joy Zhang, a professor who studies the ethics of emerging science at the University of Kent in the UK. She cited China’s “lack of transparency on scientific data and a difficult history of vaccine delivery.”
Bahrain became the second country to approve a Chinese COVID-19 vaccine last week and joined the United Arab Emirates. Morocco plans to use Chinese vaccines in a massive vaccination campaign starting 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 vaccine candidate from Chinese company Sinovac without citing any evidence, saying Brazilians will not be used as ‘guinea pigs’.
Many experts praise China’s vaccine capabilities.
“The studies look good,” said Jamie Triccas, chief of immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Sydney Medical School, referring to the results of clinical trials published in scientific journals. “I wouldn’t worry too much about that.”
China has been building immunization programs for over a decade. It has produced widely successful vaccines for its own population, including measles and hepatitis vaccinations, said Jin Dong-yan, a medical professor 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.”
China has been cooperating with the Gates Foundation and others for the past decade to improve production quality. The World Health Organization has prequalified five non-COVID-19 Chinese vaccines, allowing UN agencies to purchase them for other countries.
Companies whose products have won prequalification include Sinovac and the state-owned Sinopharm, both leading developers of COVID-19 vaccines.
Still, the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, a Sinopharm subsidiary behind one of the COVID-19 candidates, became embroiled in a vaccination scandal in 2018.
Government inspectors found that the company, based in the city where the coronavirus was first discovered last year, had made hundreds of thousands of ineffective doses of a diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough combination vaccine because of faulty equipment.
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 different childhood vaccines had been improperly stored and sold nationwide for years.
Vaccination coverage has fallen after those scandals.
‘All my local Chinese friends are servants, they are well off and none of them will buy medicines made in China. That’s just 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 medicines made in China.
China revised its laws in 2017 and 2019 to tighten up vaccine storage management and increase inspections and sanctions for faulty vaccines.
The country’s top COVID-19 vaccine developers have published a number of scientific findings in peer-reviewed scientific journals. But international experts wondered how China recruited volunteers and what kind of tracking there was for potential side effects. Chinese companies and government officials have not released details.
Now, after the release of data on the effectiveness of the Western vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna, experts await the Chinese results. Regulators in the UAE, where a Sinopharm vaccine was being tested, have said it appeared 86% effective based on interim clinical trial data. The Turkish government announced on Thursday that Sinovac is 91.25% effective based on interim 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 interview requests.
For some people in countries where the pandemic is showing no signs of relief, the country of origin of a vaccine does not matter.
“I plan to take it first to come, 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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Associated Press writers David Biller in Rio de Janeiro and María Verza in Mexico City contributed to this report.