Tough road ahead for Chinese Covid vaccine after fall in efficacy rate

By Ateet Sharma New Delhi, Jan 15 : Countries around the world are becoming increasingly skeptical of the Chinese Sinovac Biotech Covid-19 vaccine, the efficacy rate of which has reportedly fallen dramatically over the past few days. A latest study in Brazil, a country where the largest trial of the Chinese vaccine is being carried out, has revealed that the efficacy rate of the CoronaVac vaccine is just over 50 per cent, a massive fall from the 78 per cent initially projected.
The new revelation has put in a spot of bother countries like Thailand which has ordered two million doses of CoronaVac and others like Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Chile, etc. who have also ordered vaccines from China and are now pondering over their next move.
It was after carrying research with 12,500 volunteers in 16 scientific centers in Brazil that the Butantan Institute and the Government of Sao Paulo announced that the coronavirus vaccine achieved 50.38 per cent overall effectiveness when accounting for patients with “very mild” symptoms, a figure which barely exceeds the threshold established by the World Health Organization. The institute however added that the vaccine was found to be fully effective in preventing severe cases.
On the other hand, in comparison to the Chinese vaccine, those developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have shown around 95 per cent efficacy at preventing Covid-19 illness and the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine’s efficacy has been reported as 70.4 per cent.
Around a thousand people are dying every day in Brazil, a country with the third-largest caseload in the world, due to Covid-19 with Sao Paulo state alone recording 49,289 overall deaths due to the global pandemic till Thursday.
The vaccine was developed by Butantan just over six months ago, in an international partnership with the biopharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech, based in Beijing.