Sinovac: Brazil center to receive China’s vaccine this week

Brazil’s Butantan Institute biomedical center will receive the first doses of China’s Sinovac vaccine against COVID-19 this week, institute director Dimas Covas was quoted as saying by Reuters.

Covas told a congressional committee monitoring Brazil’s COVID-19 response that preliminary results of the trials Butantan is conducting in Brazil indicate the vaccine, called CoronaVac, has an excellent safety profile.

According to Reuters, he said Butantan expects to have 46 million doses ready in January pending approval of the vaccine by Brazil’s health regulator Anvisa.

Brazil’s Sao Paulo also plans to roll out CoronaVac as early as January and has agreed a supply deal with Sinovac.

Sinovac Biotech’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine CoronaVac triggered a quick immune response but the level of antibodies produced was lower than in people who had recovered from the disease, preliminary trial results cited by Reuters showed.

CoronaVac is also being considered by Brazil and Indonesia for inoculations in the coming months.

Reuters stated that Indonesia has sought emergency authorization to start a mass vaccination campaign by the end of the year and vaccines produced by Sinovac and China’s Sinopharm are slated to be used in the early stages of the campaign.

While the early to mid-stage trials were not designed to assess the efficacy of CoronaVac, researchers said it could provide sufficient protection, based on their experience with other vaccines and data from preclinical studies with macaques.

The study comes hot on the heels of upbeat news this month from US drugmakers Pfizer and Moderna as well as Russia that showed their experimental vaccines were over 90 percent effective based on interim data from large, late-stage trials.

CoronaVac and four other experimental vaccines developed in China are currently undergoing late-stage trials to determine their effectiveness in preventing COVID-19, Reuters said.

The Sinovac findings, published in a peer-reviewed paper in medical journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases, came from results in Phase I and Phase II clinical trials in China involving more than 700 participants.

“Our findings show that CoronaVac is capable of inducing a quick antibody response within four weeks of immunization by giving two doses of the vaccine at a 14-day interval,” Zhu Fengcai, one of the authors of the paper, said.

“We believe that this makes the vaccine suitable for emergency use during the pandemic,” Zhu said in a statement published alongside the paper.