Beijing scientists: Our Covid vaccines have little effect
To boost protection rate, scientists hypothesize the administration of different vaccines to the same patient. A state media campaign has begun to cover fraud. China is the leading exporter of coronavirus vaccines. The risks for Europe.
Beijing (AsiaNews / Agencies) - Chinese vaccines against Covid-19 have little effects. This rare admission of failure stated Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Office for Disease Control and Prevention on April 10, especially on the subject of the coronavirus pandemic, which according to President Xi Jinping has been successfully addressed.
To increase effectiveness, Gao hypothesized the administration of different vaccines to the same patient, to increase the number of doses injected from two to three and to change the interval between one dose and another.
So far, China has developed four vaccines. They are all “inactivated, therefore obtained from killed microorganisms. Brazilian studies claim that the Chinese Sinovac is effective in 50.4% of cases; Turkish tests recorded a success rate of 91.25%; those of Indonesia by 65.3%.
Vaccines produced in the West such as Moderna, Pfzer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca are more than 90% effective. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a vaccine must be more than 50% effective in order to be distributed.
After the hype caused by his intervention in Chengdu (Sichuan), Gao tried to correct himself. In an interview with the government (and nationalist) Global Times, the Chinese scientist said that his words were misinterpreted and that "the protection levels of vaccines developed so far around the world are sometimes high and sometimes low”.
The Chinese press largely ignored Gao's original comments. His statements have attracted criticism from some users of the Weibo social media, who invited him to "shut up".
Many foreign experts have criticized the Chinese process for vaccine approval, which is considered to be less transparent than those adopted in the West. Strong concern was expressed above all for the launch of the vaccination campaign before completing the tests, including those of phase 3 on a large scale.
Gao's statements pose a problem for all those countries (60 according to Beijing) that have received or bought Chinese vaccines for free. China is teh largest vaccine exporter, despite the fact that they have not yet obtained recognition of validity and efficacy from the WHO. For this reason, they cannot be included in Covax, the global program for vaccinating developing countries.
The low efficacy of Sinopharm, Sinovac Biotech and CanSino Biologics vaccines also threatens to jeopardize the immunization campaign in the European Union. Going against the indications of the EU authorities, the Hungary of nationalist Viktor Orbán bought and inoculated doses of Chinese medicines against the coronavirus.
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10/11/2020 09:34
