The Covid-19 outbreak that brought China's financial hub to a standstill has shown the willingness of the government to go to extreme lengths to contain the virus. One thing that has been unwilling to be done is deploy a vaccine against the omicron variant. The shots could help the country transition away from its stance of Covid Zero and reduce the chances of elderly and vulnerable Chinese getting seriously ill or dying.
In March 2020 a Chinese company agreed to buy a stake in a German company that is developing a vaccine for the treatment of cancer. The two companies had arrived at a plan to distribute 100 million doses in China once they got the green light from the government. The drug regulator has yet to approve.
The president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China wrote to the Chinese government in April urging them to allow the shots.
As of April 24.
It was compiled by Bloomberg.
Many analysts think that the wait is for a local company to come up with a vaccine. Since the start of the Pandemic, the government has promoted self-reliance in fighting Covid, promoting domestic vaccines based on inactivated versions of the virus and barring foreign ones from the market. Almost all of the people in China have received two shots.
Allison Hills, senior consultant in London with Eradigm consulting, says that opening up to foreign-made shots is a risk.
There are clinical trials that show that the Sinovac vaccine is less effective in stopping infections than other vaccines.
Last year, optimists hoped China's go-it-alone strategy would lead to the quick approval of a locally made vaccine. After Beijing gave the green light, the partners invested in a new facility to ramp up production, with state media reporting production would start by August 2021. The vaccine is unlikely to reach the market before the end of 2022, according to the results of early trials.
The Walvax group took a different approach. The Chinese vaccine targets a part of the coronavirus spike that is binding to cells in the body, which is different from the shots from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna Inc. For vaccine developers, focusing on this smaller area, called the receptor binding domain, can reduce costs and facilitate manufacturing. This particular domain is a focal point for newer versions of the disease.
The vaccine's efficacy is at risk because of the majority of the omicronmutations.
Walvax didn't respond to a request for comment regarding the design of the vaccine it co-developed with Abogen. This one has a full-length spike protein that covers major variations. The companies want to begin human testing.
Walvax's difficulties have raised the stakes for other Chinese companies working on vaccines using the same technology. CanSino Biologics Inc. andCSPC Pharmaceutical Group were given permission by China to begin first-phase trials.
Stemirna plans to conduct further testing in Brazil. It wants to get emergency-use approval in Southeast Asia and South America. Beijing-based AIM Vaccine Co., which has a Phase 2 trial of its mRNA vaccine under way in China, expects to apply for conditional approval by the end of the year, according to Lingna Ding.
China crushed covid. But Covid Zero could destroy China.
The data from Hong Kong shows why the vaccine is valuable in China. The University of Hong Kong conducted a study in late March that concluded that Sinovac was more effective than BioNTech's vaccine. For protection against death, the vaccine effectiveness in people 80 and older was 84.5%, compared with just 60.2% for Sinovac.
There was no significant gap for those who had received three doses. Only about 10% of seniors had received boosters and government vaccination teams dispatched to nursing homes with the worst outbreak areas, and only offered Sinovac shots.
A study by Hong Kong researchers was published in January in the journal Nature, which concluded that governments should consider using vaccine boosters to fight the spread of omicron.
Jyoti Somani, senior consultant for the Division of Infectious Diseases at National University Hospital in Singapore, says that people who have received two doses of Chinese shots should get a booster.
That argument is gaining support in China. The road map for China's reopening was co-authored by a pulmonologist and an adviser to the government on Covid. In March, the dean of Tsinghua University's School of Pharmaceutical Sciences said that existing Chinese vaccines weren't protective enough against omicron and that the government should encourage companies to introduce more effective shots.
China's drug regulators are still weighing whether to approve the BioNTech shot, according to the chief executive officer of Fosun. Chinese drugmakers don't have any antivirals of their own, so authorities gave the green light to Pfizer's Paxlovid. Regulators might eventually lose patience with Chinese vaccine makers and open the door to BioNTech's shots.
Chinese health officials may have to focus on better deployment of the shots now available, targeting vaccine hold outs, and improving booster rates, because there is no mRNA vaccine on the horizon. Half of the population has received a booster shot. In the U.S., about 30% of the vaccines are a good thing.
The Covid Zero policy is making that more difficult, with millions of residents stuck in their homes.
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