Indonesia became the first country outside of China to approve emergency use of a Covid-19 vaccine developed by Chinese drug company Sinovac Biotech Ltd., despite findings placing the candidate’s efficacy among the lowest for new coronavirus vaccines.
The Indonesian Food and Drug Agency said Monday that a late-stage clinical trial in the major city of Bandung has shown Sinovac’s CoronaVac vaccine to be 65.3% effective. That’s comparable to the results of clinical trials from Brazil last week, showing that the vaccine had a 78% efficacy rate.
According to Penny Lukito, the head of the Indonesian National Agency for Drugs and Food Control, the Indonesian study found CoronaVac to be safe, with participants experiencing only minor side effects such as fatigue and fever. “Hopefully vaccines against Covid-19 will be one of the factors in overcoming this pandemic,” she said.
A rate of 65% exceeds the 50% threshold that the World Health Organization and many regulatory agencies consider necessary for widespread use. Western vaccines developed by Moderna Inc. and jointly by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE have reported their vaccines to be over 90% effective; another developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca PLC was at least 62% effective, according to the team.
Authorities in Brazil have yet to approve CoronaVac for use, although President Jair Bolsonaro’s government has withdrawn from its previous criticisms of Chinese vaccines and has agreed to purchase up to 100 million injections of the vaccine.