China leaps ahead in race to sell Covid jabs
ISTANBUL/LONDON: China is stealing a march on Western drugmakers in the race to supply a Covid-19 vaccine to developing nations, with Indonesia and Turkey rolling out huge campaigns this week, Brazil due to follow soon, and even EU member Hungary signing up.
Scientists in some Western countries say China has been too slow to publish trial data and public reports about how well its vaccines work have been inconsistent, which the Chinese firms attribute to variations in methodology.
Still, countries with hundreds of millions of people desperate for a vaccine think China’s vaccine is good enough.
As Western drugmakers struggle to meet demand at home, Beijing has sent millions of doses round the world of CoronaVac, made by Sinovac Biotech, and is also marketing a separate vaccine made by another company, Sinopharm.
The exports come even as China battles its own flare-up in infections, which has put more than 28 million people in lockdown. China has administered 10 million vaccine doses at home.
Although some studies on the Sinovac shot have reported lower effectiveness rates than some Western products, the countries buying them say they appear effective at preventing the most serious, deadly form of Covid-19.
Perhaps most importantly, they are also easy to administer, allowing the quick launch of large-scale programmes to save lives and prevent health systems from being overwhelmed.
Turkey launched its programme on Thursday with the Sinovac shot and by late afternoon said it had already vaccinated more than 200,000 people — more in a few hours than France has managed in three weeks.
Hungary, which has complained about the “scandalously” slow rollout of vaccines bought by the European Union on behalf of its 27 member states, reached a deal on Thursday to buy the Sinopharm vaccine.
If approved, it would become the first EU country to authorise a Chinese vaccine.
While all countries are likely to need more than one type of vaccine to meet demand, China has been quick off the mark in shipping doses to countries at the back of the queue for supplies of Western shots.
Many developing countries may still have months to wait for their first vaccines.
Meanwhile, Turkey already has three million doses of the Sinovac vaccine — Brazil has twice that and is expected to begin injecting them next week.
Indonesia kicked off one of the world’s biggest vaccine programmes on Wednesday. It expects to have 30 million Sinovac doses by the end of March out of an order of more than 122 million in 2022.