Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Sep 7: China that generated the Coronavirus virtually immobilizing the world economy, also claims to be the first country in the world to “display” a potential vaccine to battle against the pandemic.
China has put its homegrown coronavirus vaccines on display for the first time as the country looked to shape the narrative surrounding the pandemic. As people at a Beijing trade fair on Monday crowded around booths showing the small vials of liquid, high hopes hang around the potential game-changing vaccine candidates produced by Chinese companies Sinovac Biotech and Sinopharm.
Neither has hit the market yet but the makers hope they will be approved after all-important phase three trials as early as year-end. A Sinovac representative told news agency that his firm had already “completed the construction of a vaccine factory” able to produce 300 million doses a year.
China, which is facing a storm of foreign criticism over its early handling of the pandemic, has been trying to repurpose the story of Covid-19 with the state-owned media and government officials emphasising the revival of Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the deadly pathogen surfaced, as a success story in the fight against the virus.
They are also touting progress on domestic vaccines as a sign of Chinese leadership and resilience in the face of an unprecedented health threat that has pummelled the global economy. In May, President Xi Jinping had pledged to make any potential vaccine developed by China a “global public good.”
The potential vaccines on display at the Beijing trade fair are among nearly 10 worldwide to enter phase three trials, typically the last step ahead of regulatory approval, as countries race to stub out the virus and reboot battered economies.
Sinopharm said it anticipate the antibodies from its jab to last between one and three years — although the final result would only be known after the trials. China’s nationalistic tabloid Global Times reported last month that “the price of the vaccines will not be high.” Every two doses should cost below 1,000 yuan ($146), the report said citing Sinopharm’s chairman who told media that he had already been injected with one of the candidate vaccines.
China’s official Xinhua news agency reported on Monday that another vaccine candidate, developed by Chinese military scientists, could deal with mutations in the coronavirus.
As of last month, at least 5.7 billion doses of the vaccines under development around the world had been pre-ordered. But the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that widespread immunisation against Covid-19 was unlikely to be on the cards until the middle of next year.