Chile defends use of Chinese Sinovac Vaccine

The Chilean Minister of Science made a strong defense of the Sinovac vaccine on Sunday, after the highest authority of China’s disease control agency said that the effectiveness of its vaccines against COVID-19 is low and the government of that country Asian is considering changing them.

“In relation to the doubts that press articles have raised” about the Chinese Sinovac vaccine, “we reiterate the importance of framing the discussion in the available evidence,” said Minister Andrés Couve. “We have scientific studies with the highest standards to evaluate its safety and effectiveness,” he added.

Chile was one of the first countries in the world to bet on inoculation with the Chinese vaccine and has immunized most of its population with it. So far it has applied more than 10 million doses, according to data from the Ministry of Health. The South American country has also used the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine on a smaller scale (more than 1.4 million doses).

Chinese drugs “do not have very high protection rates,” said the director of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control, Gao Fu, at a conference on Saturday in the southwestern city of Chengdu.

Beijing has distributed hundreds of millions of doses in other countries and tried to raise doubts about the effectiveness of Western vaccines.

The unusual statement by the Chinese official sparked a huge media buzz and called into question the Chinese vaccine. Couve, the Chilean minister, cited a recent study in Brazil that according to what he concluded that the efficacy of the vaccine for mild cases is 50.7%, with moderate symptoms it is 83.7% and 100% “for severe cases that require assistance from the health system ”.

Couve anticipated that a study on the efficacy and effectiveness of the vaccine carried out by Chilean universities together with the Ministry of Health will be made public in Chile by the middle of next week. It will be one of the first in the world to demonstrate how the Chinese vaccine works in the real population, beyond clinical trials.

“Vaccines save lives. Efficacy should not be in doubt. The director of the Chinese CDC only said in a talk that it is necessary to see how this advance indicates or not the need to reinforce the vaccine with this or another scheme. Something that is in development”, Heriberto García, director of the Institute of Public Health that approved the vaccine in Chile, tweeted on his side.

The booster is something that is also being studied in the case of other vaccines, especially given the appearance of new, more contagious COVID variants.

Other experts emphasize that the main objective of vaccines is to stop hospitalizations and deaths and not just stop infections.

Beyond what has been published, “which does not indicate low effectiveness but rather the suggestion of the need for a booster or additional dose from month 6 of application, the results presented from their clinical trials continue to be excellent, with an efficacy level of around 80% for symptomatic events and close to 100% efficacy in severe cases ”, Humberto Debat, a virologist and researcher at the National Institute of Agricultural Technology in Córdoba and member of the PAIS consortium of SARS-CoV genomics, told The Associated Press in Argentina.

“It is important to differentiate the ability of this and other vaccines to prevent infection (and therefore the eventuality that those immunized are potentially transmitters of the virus) from the excellent ability to prevent severe cases,” said Derat regarding Sinovac.

The Chilean minister also made a call to continue being vaccinated at a time when there is a decrease in people who come to receive the first dose of the inoculant.

Chile has so far vaccinated 7,369,321 million people with a single dose out of a population of 19 million (38%) and 4,662,274 with two doses (24%).

Chile accumulates 1,076,499 infections, almost 50,000 reported in the last week, in a reflection of the resurgence of COVID-19. While more than 24,346 people have died from the virus, according to official figures.

Despite being the country in Latin America with the largest population vaccinated against the coronavirus, Chile is probably experiencing the worst moment of infections due to the disease that has its hospital system at the top. The authorities insist that it will still take time for the vaccination to show its positive effects.