In July, the shot was reported to have passed an expert review by Chinese regulators and was in the administration review stage, according to Fosun Pharma, the Chinese partner of BioNTech licensed to produce and distribute the vaccine in the Greater China region. Fosun was even planning to start domestic trial production by the end of August.
However, five months later there is still no word from Chinese officials on when — or whether — the vaccine will ever be approved, even as the newly emerged Omicron variant poses a fresh challenge to China’s zero-Covid strategy — and its less effective domestic vaccines.
Much remains unknown about the fast-spreading Omicron variant, which carries an unusually large amount of mutations that scientists worry could potentially make it more transmissible and less susceptible to existing vaccines.
Preliminary lab studies show two doses of the BioNTech vaccine, which is produced by Pfizer outside of China, may not provide sufficient protection against infection with Omicron, but three doses are able to neutralize it, Pfizer/BioNTech said in a news release last week. Two doses may still provide protection against severe disease, it added.
China has not released studies on how much its domestic vaccines protect against Omicron, though experts and state media have voiced confidence in curbing the new variant.
More than 1.1 billion Chinese people — or nearly 80% of the population — have been fully inoculated, mostly with inactivated vaccines developed by Sinopharm and Sinovac. But their efficacy was found to be much lower than the mRNA shots, and studies suggest the immunity provided by the Chinese vaccines wanes rapidly.
According to the World Health Organization, Sinovac’s vaccine CoronaVac was just 51% effective at preventing symptomatic disease against the original variant, while Sinopharm was 79%. In comparison, the efficacy of mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna were as high as 95%.
And a Hong Kong study…
Source : cnn
