Five Chinese vaccine candidates to finish clinical trials
November 24, 2020 Category Health, Weekly
Vaccine developers Pfizer and BioNTech plan to roll out the first doses of their Covid-19 vaccine within weeks, once they receive emergency use permissions from regulators. They expect to have 1.3 billion doses ready next year. Pfizer and BioNTech could secure emergency U.S. and European authorization for using their Covid-19 vaccine next month. Of the 170 volunteers who contracted Covid-19 in Pfizer’s trial involving over 43,000 people, 162 had received a placebo and not the vaccine, meaning the vaccine was 95% effective. Conditional approval in the European Union could be secured in the second half of December, while deliveries could start before Christmas. AstraZeneca and Oxford University’s potential Covid-19 vaccine produced a strong immune response in older adults, data showed, with researchers expecting to release late-stage trial results by Christmas.
But despite these two announcements, Chinese vaccine makers said that China’s development of Covid-19 vaccines remains in the lead. China’s leading vaccine producer Sinopharm told the Global Times that it has reported the phase-III clinical data to China’s relevant regulators. The vaccine maker, claiming it is in the final stage before marketing, stressed that it is not under pressure to reveal its vaccine data and will do so in a more scientific and controlled way. Another leading inactivated vaccine producer, Sinovac, said that it will not release the relevant data until it is assured to obtain sufficient Covid-19 cases in its double-blind, placebo-controlled trials to certify vaccine effectiveness. The release is expected by the end of November. Five Chinese vaccine candidates are under clinical phase-III trials in countries including the UAE, Brazil, Pakistan and Peru, and phase-I and II clinical trials of other candidates have been accelerated. Sinopharm’s two inactivated vaccines have been administered to nearly one million people for emergency use and no serious adverse reactions have been reported. Nearly 60,000 volunteers have participated in the phase-III clinical trials in more than 10 countries.
How to ensure transportation of Covid-19 vaccines has become a hot topic for the global cargo industry. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) said that delivering billions of doses of a vaccine that must be transported and stored in a deep-frozen state to the entire world efficiently will involve hugely complex logistical challenges across the supply chain. Market watchers believe that the prospect of vaccine transportation may stimulate the recovery of the aviation market, especially the cargo industry. Cai Guoxian, regional head of North Asia with the IATA, said at an industry forum held in Zhengzhou, Henan province, that assuming one dose per person in the world, billions of doses of vaccine would need to be transported, requiring 8,000 Boeing 747 freighters, which will lend strong support to the cargo industry.
Small local outbreaks are emerging in several Chinese cities. Shanghai reported five new confirmed locally transmitted Covid-19 cases and three communities in the Pudong New Area where the patients live have been designated as medium-risk areas. A cargo security inspector at Pudong International Airport and his wife, a nurse at Pudong Hospital, were confirmed as two new locally transmitted Covid-19 cases and three people were found infected during the follow-up contact tracing. Shanghai Pudong Hospital has suspended its daily outpatient and emergency services. A total of 4,015 medical staff, workers and patients have been quarantined in the hospital. People in the medium-risk areas are not allowed to leave Shanghai unless in an emergency. The first of Shanghai’s latest coronavirus infections emerged in two airport cargo handlers who cleaned a container that arrived on a flight from North America. The container was damp inside and sealed off. Airport officials have tested 17,719 employees at Pudong airport’s cargo handling area. A tests turned out negative, but a FedEx (China) employee was confirmed as a new Covid-19 cases on November 23. Since November 9, six freight transport workers at the airport have been confirmed positive for Covid-19. The wives of two of the staffers are also confirmed as infected. The confirmed cases have only been found at the airport’s cargo handling area, and the airport’s passenger area is unaffected.
Five new locally transmitted cases were also confirmed in Tianjin. Authorities started conducting nucleic acid tests for 2.24 million residents in the Binhai New Area, to be completed in two to three days. Two cold-chain storage workers were among the infected, as the country shifts focus to contaminated imports after a number of outbreaks linked to frozen food. Around 1,900 residents are under centralized quarantine. As of November 20, Tianjin had reported seven confirmed cases of Covid-19 and five asymptomatic cases. Two cities in Fujian province said they found traces of the virus in shipments of pomfret fish from India and beef from Argentina. Three new locally transmitted cases were reported in Manzhouli, a city in Inner Mongolia bordering Russia’s Far East. All 300,000 residents of the city have been tested.
In Wuhan, authorities said earlier they had detected the virus on frozen beef from Brazil, while several other cities reported positive test results on samples from imported food, including Argentinian pork and Indian cuttlefish. Customs officials have temporarily suspended imports from some suppliers. Mass-testing campaigns have been rolled out after reports of coronavirus traces on imported food and packaging, with state TV showing workers disinfecting transport trucks and inspecting packages of frozen salmon. Wu Zunyou, Chief Epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Global Times that low temperatures in winter make the international freight environment similar to a cold chain, creating a “cold chain” effect on all imported goods.
Air France’s flight from Paris to Shanghai has been suspended by China’s civil aviation regulator for a week from November 23. Flight AF198 was suspended after six passengers on a flight from Paris tested positive for Covid-19 on November 6, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said. The weekly flight was one of the earliest international flights to Shanghai to resume after the coronavirus outbreak.
Addressing the Group of 20 Riyadh Summit via video link, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed building a “global firewall” against Covid-19, reducing tariffs and barriers as well as tapping into the booming digital economy to battle the pandemic and reboot the world economy. “To contain the virus, stabilize the economy and protect livelihood remains a long and arduous journey for all countries,” Xi said.
This overview is based on reports by The Global Times, China Daily, Shanghai Daily and The Guardian.
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