China’s Sinopharm says its coronavirus vaccine is 79% effective

By Nectar Gan

(CNN) China’s state-owned pharmaceutical giant Sinopharm has announced its coronavirus vaccine is 79.34% effective.

Interim analysis of Phase 3 clinical trials show the vaccine is safe and people who received two doses produced high-level antibodies, according to a statement published Wednesday by Beijing Biological Products Institute Co., a Sinopharm subsidiary.

The company said it was seeking formal approval from China’s regulators to distribute the vaccine to the public.Coronavirus vaccines developed by Sinopharm have already been administered to hundreds of thousands of people under a controversial emergency use program approved by the Chinese government.

By November, nearly one million people had received a Sinopharm vaccine, according to the company’s chairman, though he didn’t specify which of the company’s two vaccines they had received.

Though few details were provided, the statement released Wednesday said the vaccine met the standards of the World Health Organization and China’s own regulator, the National Medical Products Administration.

The Sinopharm vaccine is less effective than those developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which have an efficacy rate of about 95%. Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine is 91% effective.

And the vaccine’s efficacy rate of 79% is lower than the 86% announced by the United Arab Emirates for the same vaccine on December 9. The UAE based its results on an interim analysis of late-stage clinical trials conducted there from July. It has since approved the vaccine for public use.

The Sinopharm vaccine has a higher efficacy rate than the one developed by the UK’s Oxford University and AstraZeneca, which averaged 70%. On Wednesday, the UK became the first country to approve that vaccine for public distribution.

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