Sinovac and Sinopharm: COVAX signs deal for 550 million Chinese Covid-19 vaccines, even as efficacy questions grow

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Under the agreements, Chinese vaccine makers Sinopharm and Sinovac will begin supplying 110 million doses immediately, according to a press release from Gavi, a global public-private health partnership that co-leads COVAX, a global initiative aimed at distributing vaccines to countries regardless of age. wealth.

In the statement, Jaffe said the agreements came at a time when “the delta variant poses an increased risk to health systems.”

Gavi said Gavi has the option to purchase a total of 170 vaccines from Sinopharm and 380 million Sinovac vaccines.

As of June 30, Sinovac has delivered more than 1 billion doses worldwide, company Chairman and CEO Weidong Yin said in a statement about the COVAX deal.

“Our job at Sinovac is to provide vaccines in an effort to eradicate human disease,” he said.

The new agreements were welcomed by Dr. Seth Berkeley, CEO of Gavi, who said the vaccines were an example of Gavi’s strategy to ensure there were “options in the face of constraints such as supply delays”.

The deployment of COVAX fell behind schedule earlier this year, after the coronavirus crisis in India resulted in the country’s largest vaccine maker failing to deliver millions of shots on time. Monday’s announcement comes as Chinese vaccines face increasing scrutiny over their efficacy, particularly against the rapidly spreading delta variant, and Thai health authorities announced on Monday that health care workers will receive a booster dose of AstraZeneca or Pfizer, after 618 of more than 677,000 medical staff. Those who received two doses of Sinovac tested positive for Covid-19. Of the 618 who tested positive for the virus, only two became seriously ill, including a nurse who died.

“Nevertheless, all vaccines have been shown to be effective in preventing hospitalization and death,” Bensum Ltsethichai, a foreign ministry official, told a briefing Monday, adding that medical personnel had significant exposure to Covid-19 which could have contributed to “ Vaccination”. unsuccessfully.”

Singapore officials said last week they would exclude Sinovac shots from the city’s total number of vaccinations due to insufficient efficacy data for the vaccine, especially against the delta variant, Reuters reported. Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines have been validated by the World Health Organization (WHO) for emergency use.

So far, experiments show that Sinopharm and Sinovac are less effective against Covid-19 than their mRNA counterparts. In Brazilian trials, Sinovac had nearly 50% efficacy against Covid-19 symptoms, and 100% efficacy against severe disease, according to trial data submitted to the World Health Organization. The efficacy of Sinopharm for both symptoms and hospitalizations has been estimated at 79%, according to the World Health Organization.

Vaccines from both Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna — which also signed deals with COVAX — are more than 90% effective against Covid-19 symptoms.

COVAX has legally binding contracts with manufacturers for about 3.8 billion doses — and 1.9 billion of them are expected to be available for supply by the end of the year, according to COVAX’s latest global supply forecast. According to UNICEF’s Vaccine Supply Dashboard, 107.5 million doses have been shipped via COVAX to 135 countries.

CNN’s Yong Xiong contributed to this report.

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