With rich countries seizing products of COVID-19 vaccines, some parts of the world may have to rely on images developed in China to try to overcome the revolution. Question: Will they work?
There is no outside reason to believe that they will not, but there is a history of vaccine scandals in China, and their drug dealers have not revealed much about their last human trials and more than one million emergency use inoculations have already been made within the country.
Wealthy countries have recovered about nine billion of the 12 billion heavily developed Western blows that are expected to be delivered next year, while COVAX, a global effort to ensure equal access equivalent to COVID-19 vaccines, has fallen short of the promised two billion dose capacity. .
For those countries that have not yet been vaccinated, China may be the only solution.
China has six candidates in the final round of tests and is one of the few countries that can vaccinate on a large scale. Government officials have announced the potential for one billion doses next year, with President Xi Jinping promising that Chinese vaccines will be a boon to the world.
The potential use of the vaccine by millions of people in other countries allows China to both repair its reputational damage from a revolution that has fled its borders and to show to the world that he can be a major scientific player.
But scandals in the past have damaged his own citizens’ trust in his vaccines, with manufacturing and supply chain problems calling into question whether he can be a liberator.
“There is still a question mark over how China can ensure the delivery of reliable vaccines,” said Joy Zhang, a professor who studies emerging science ethics at the University of Kent in Britain. She said there was “an ambiguity regarding scientific data and a troubled history with vaccine delivery”.
Bahrain was last week the second country to approve the Chinese COVID-19 vaccine, joining the United Arab Emirates. Morocco plans to use Chinese vaccines in a major slate vaccination campaign to begin this month. Chinese vaccines are also awaiting approval in Turkey, Indonesia and Brazil, while trials are continuing 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 once again questioned the effectiveness of the Chinese candidate Sinovac’s vaccine candidate without citing any evidence, and said Brazilians will not be used as “guinea pigs”.
Many experts recommend China’s vaccine capabilities.
“The studies appear to be well done,” said Jamie Triccas, head of immunology and infectious diseases at Sydney University medical school, referring to clinical trial results published in scientific journals. “I wouldn’t be too worried about that.”
An employee loads filters for use in the production line for vaccine for COVID-19 at Chinese company Sinovac at their factory in Beijing [File:Ng Han Guan/AP]
China has been picking up its vaccination programs for more than a decade. He has successfully produced large-scale vaccines for his own population, including vaccines for measles and hepatitis, said Jin Dong-yan, a professor of medicine at the University of Hong Kong.
“There is no major outbreak in China for any of these diseases,” he said. “That means the vaccines are safe and effective.”
China has been working with Gates Foundation and others to improve manufacturing quality in the past decade. The World Health Organization has approved five non-COVID-19 Chinese vaccines, which allow UN agencies to purchase them for other countries.
Companies that have achieved pre-certification results include Sinovac and Sinopharm with the state, both major developers of COVID-19 vaccines.
However, the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, a Sinopharm subsidiary behind one of the COVID-19 candidates, was caught in a vaccine scandal in 2018.
Government investigators found that the company, based in the town where the coronavirus was discovered last year, had made hundreds of thousands of ineffective doses of a combination vaccine for diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough due to lack of equipment.
That same year it was reported that Changsheng Biotechnology Co. produced data on rabies vaccine.
In 2016, Chinese media reported that two million doses of various childhood vaccines had been improperly stored and sold across the country for years.
Vaccine levels fell after these scandals.
“All my local Chinese friends, they are white-collar, they are well off, and none of them buy medicine made in China. That’s just the way it is, “said Ray Yip, former director of the country at the Gates Foundation in China. He said he is one of the few who does not care to buy medicines made in China.
An employee examines vaccine syringes for COVID-19 manufactured by Sinovac [File:Ng Han Guan/AP]
China revised its laws in 2017 and 2019 to tighten the regulation of vaccine storage and step up inspections and penalties for defective vaccines.
The country’s leading COVID-19 vaccine developers have published some scientific findings in peer-reviewed scientific journals. But international experts questioned how China was recruiting volunteers and what kind of search was there for possible side effects. Chinese companies and government officials have not released information.
Now, after releasing data on the effectiveness of Western-made vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna, experts are waiting to see China’s results. Regulators in the UAE, where the Sinopharm vaccine has been tested, have said it showed 86 percent effectiveness based on interim clinical trial data.
On Thursday, the Turkish government announced that Sinovac is 91.25 percent effective from interim data.
Sinopharm did not respond to a request for comment on vaccine efficacy data. Sinovac and CanSino, another Chinese vaccine company, did not respond to interview requests.
For some people in countries where the pandemic does not show mitigation, the nation of vaccine origination is no different.
“I plan to take it, the first one to come if it goes right,” said Daniel Alves Santos, a chef at a restaurant in Rio de Janeiro. “And I hope God helps.”