Sinovac outpaces Western jabs in trials

JAKARTA. – Sinovac Biotech Ltd’s vaccine is wiping out Covid-19 among health workers in Indonesia, an encouraging sign for the dozens of developing countries reliant on the controversial Chinese shot, which performed far worse than Western vaccines in clinical trials.

Indonesia tracked 128 290 health workers in capital city Jakarta from January to March and found that the vaccine protected 98 percent of them from death and 96 percent from hospitalization as soon as seven days after the second dose, Pandji Dhewantara, a Health Ministry official who oversaw the study, said in a Wednesday press conference.

Dhewantara also said that 94 percent of the workers had been protected against symptomatic infection – an extraordinary result that goes beyond what was measured in the shot’s numerous clinical trials. Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin earlier revealed a smaller version of the study involving 25 374 people in a Tuesday interview that had the same effectiveness data for hospitalisation and infection. Protection against death was 100 percent in the smaller group.

“We see a very, very drastic drop,” in hospitalizations and deaths among medical workers, Sadikin said. It’s not known what strain of the coronavirus Sinovac’s shot worked against in Indonesia, but the country has not flagged any major outbreaks driven by variants of concern.

A spokesman for Sinovac in Beijing said the company cannot comment on the Indonesian study until it acquires more details.

The Indonesian study compared vaccinated against non-vaccinated people to derive the estimated effectiveness. The median age of the participants is 31 years old.

In a separate interview, Sinovac’s chief executive officer Yin Weidong defended the disparity in clinical data around the shot, and said there was growing evidence CoronaVac is performing better when applied in the real world.

But the real-world examples also show that the Sinovac shot’s ability to quell outbreaks requires the vast majority of people to be vaccinated, a scenario that developing countries with poor health infrastructure and limited access to shots cannot reach quickly. In the Indonesian health worker study, and another in a Brazilian town of 45 000 people called Serrana, nearly 100% of people studied were fully vaccinated, with serious illness and deaths dropping after they were inoculated.

The mRNA shot developed by BioNTech SE and Pfizer Inc. has been shown to be over 90 percent effective in preventing transmission in Israel.

While non-mRNA vaccines are unlikely to be that effective in preventing transmission, the growing body of evidence that Sinovac’s shot works is a boon to China’s mission of supplying the developing world in a bid to increase its influence and standing. It’s also somewhat of a vindication amid criticism that Chinese vaccine developers disclosed less data and were less transparent about severe adverse events compared with western companies. – Bloomberg.