Sinopharm’s Vaccine

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Sinopharm has made a vaccine that will be available by the end of the year. The vaccines are being tested in countries including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Peru and Argentina. On 9 October, China has joined COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access (COVAX) that aims to provide two billion doses of vaccine to the most vulnerable people ad to health-care workers. Chinese vaccine makers have developed four candidate vaccines that are in the final stages of testing worldwide. No vaccine has yet completed the crucial phase III trials but every country is trying. With the trial is still testing, the price is expected to be higher than any put forward for a coronavirus vaccine so far.

Price

Sinopharm CEO Lui Jingzhen, told a chinese newspaper that it would cost a few hundred yuan for a shot and an estimate of $145 for a two shots. In a two shot approach the results will increase the vaccine’s effectiveness as it takes two doses from the patient compare to other companies that favors a single shot approach. Liu said that the cost is not very high but, in fact, it’s significantly more expensive than the projected prices of its peers such as Moderna, an American vaccine maker says it will charge $32 to #37 per dose. Johnson & Johnson, the American pharmaceutical company, has made a deal with the U.S. government that suggests its vaccine will cost around $10 per shot. Another example of companies charging low is in the U.K., AstraZeneca, the British pharmaceutical company, and Oxford University may offer their vaccine candidate for as low as $3 per injection.

Demand and supplies

Xi Jinping, China’s Leader, told the World Health Assembly in May that it would be a “global public good” and the list of countries which are willing to work with China continues to grow. In the past few months, government leaders, including Xi and Premier Li Keqiang have pledged publicly to make Chinese vaccine accessible to the Philippines, Cambodia, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos, as well as African and Latin American countries. China has the capacity to produce 600 million doses by the end of the year, and one billion next year says by the head of the Chinese government’s COVID-19 vaccine task force, Zheng Zhongwei. But people like Klaus Stohr does not believe that China will export that much amount of doses as the 1.4 billion people in the country have not been vaccinated. If China commits doses of vaccines, they will need to be approved by the WHO  and CEPI. Currently none of the four Chinese candidates are supported by CEPI.

Questions  Arise from the Chinese data

Paul Offit, a vaccine researcher at the Children’s Hospital of Phildephia in Pennsylvania said that patients who were vaccinated might assume that any influena-like symptoms that could not have arisen from a SARS-CoV-2 infection and not report them. Wu said that the preliminary data would only be a “small part” of evidence that the Chinese regulator used to evaluate vaccines but it is also necessary to obtain the valid data of phase III clinical trials to fully assess the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine.