Sinovac vaccine photo
China's Sinovac's COVID-19 vaccine revealed on Thursday 78 percent efficacy rate and 100 percent protection against severe coronavirus infections in Phase III trials conducted in Brazil, bringing it closer to its domestic approval for the market and raises hopes for the second effective Chinese vaccine to be widely used, experts said.
The Brazilian Health Minister announced on Thursday the country would purchase 100 million doses of Sinovac's vaccine called CoronaVac for the Brazilian national immunity plan scheduled to start on January 25, following other developing countries, such as Indonesia, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates, to secure Chinese inactivated vaccines in national inoculation.
As Europe, the US, and some Middle East countries speed up mass vaccination, observers are concerned that a mass inoculation race overseas may pressure Chinese herd immunity efforts against the coronavirus.
Chinese mass vaccination slow? China's effective measures against the outbreak mean few people have contracted the virus and developed antibodies, while people in some Western countries quicky achieved herd immunity through either infections or vaccines. Such an "immunity gap" between the West and China would be epidemiologically and ecologically dangerous, Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations of the US, told the Global Times.
Though with less pressure in epidemic control, it is still urgent for China to speed up mass vaccination, experts warned, saying that the next six months would be a "golden period" to promote public immunity against the coronavirus.
As of Thursday, the top five countries with the highest percentage of their populations vaccinated against coronavirus are Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, the UK and the US, while China ranked 15th, according to data on the Our World in Data, a global data-recording platform developed by Oxford University.
But in terms of the total number of doses being used, China is now in second place (4.5 million doses as of December 31, 2020), only behind the US (5.92 million).
Sinopharm on Thursday announced that more than 4 million doses of its inactivated vaccine had been administered in China as of Monday, and more than 10 million doses had been distributed across national vaccination sites. No serious adverse reactions have been reported so far.
Other vaccine candidates, including those produced by Sinovac and CanSino, have also been taken for emergency use in China, and the overall doses given should have reached over 5 million, a Beijing-based immunological professor who prefers not to be named said.
"China has no slowdown in regard to both the emergency vaccination schedule and orderly arrangement," Feng Duojia, president of the China Vaccine Industry Association, told the Global Times on Friday. "We are not in a race with Western countries over the speed of mass inoculation or in vaccine technology. We are in a race with the deadly virus."
"It is quite normal to see different vaccination speeds given the distinct needs and urgency in various countries. Data opacity is also a factor that leads to public hesitancy for vaccines. Cross-national vaccine deals also require more specific indicators to be revealed such as adverse reactions for various demographics," Zhuang Shilihe, a doctor who has long been concerned with vaccines, told the Global Times.