Are Chinese vaccines to blame for Asia’s rising Covid crisis?

Malaysia has announced that it will stop administering China’s Sinovac vaccine once it runs out of its existing supply amid mounting evidence that the jab is failing to stem the spread of the Delta variant.

Health minister Adham Baba said that the Southeast Asian nation had secured deliveries of 45 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, enough to vaccinate 70% of the country’s population. He told reporters that “those who have yet to be vaccinated… will receive the Pfizer vaccine”.

Malaysia’s decision to ditch the Sinovac jab comes amid rising cases in Chile, which has extensively relied on the Chinese-developed vaccine, as well as increased infections in Indonesia, which has replaced India as the country with the highest death rate per capita in the world following the arrival of the highly infectious Covid variant.

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Jab doubts

In recent months, vaccines developed in China “have played a crucial role in immunising people against Covid-19” across Asia, the BBC reports, with “millions receiving either a Sinovac or Sinopharm jab”.

“A million doses of Chinese vaccines touched down” in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh in early June, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) says, while “similar shipments of Covid-19 shots” also landed in Manila, Bangkok, Kathmandu and Jakarta.

Many of Southeast Asia’s poorer nations have been reliant on “a mix of small donations and larger sales contracts” from Beijing as “the West focused on getting their own populations inoculated and Covax, a program backed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to immunise the world, fell short of its goals”, the paper adds.

However, “questions over the effectiveness of Beijing’s vaccines” has seen some governments, for example authorities in Bangkok, “consider giving people vaccinated with the Sinovac CoronaVac a booster shot, this time from another vaccine manufacturer such as AstraZeneca”, Voice of America (VOA) reports.

In Indonesia, “the majority of vaccine doses offered so far – nearly 90% – have been made by Sinovac”, the broadcaster says. But despite this, the island nation has become the “new Asian epicentre” of Covid-19, recording more than 40,000 new cases for two days running and outstripping India’s per capita death rate.

Indonesia now has around 163 cases per million people, compared with India’s 27 as of Sunday, according to Oxford University tracking, while its per capita death rate is also higher, averaging “three per million people, compared with less than one in the south Asian country”, Nikkei Asia reports.

As infections rocket, “concerns about Sinovac have made some Indonesians hesitant to receive the shot”, VOA reports. A recent poll revealed that “one-third of residents in the province of Jakarta said they are still undecided about whether to be vaccinated”.

A similar uptick in infection rates was reported in Chile in early April, which despite a rapid vaccination rollout using a combination of the Chinese-developed Sinovac CoronaVac and the Pfizer-BioNTech jab saw a continued increase in cases even as more than a third of the 19 million-strong population received at least one dose.

Growing fear over the vaccine’s efficacy has “raised questions” about a “key plank” in many Asian countries’ jab campaigns, the BBC reports, “not only about whether China’s vaccines can be trusted, but also about its attempts at vaccine diplomacy in Asia”.

‘Weak efficacy’

The Malaysian health ministry’s decision to stop using the Sinovac jab came after the country reported its third straight day of record cases. Total infections now stand at 880,782, the worst in the region, while its death toll is up to 6,613.

Thailand is also “reporting record high numbers of infections and deaths”, the BBC reports, while Indonesia “has seen overcrowded hospitals and oxygen shortages”.

In clinical trials, “Sinovac and Sinopharm’s inactivated virus vaccines have been shown to be 50% to 79% effective in preventing symptomatic Covid infection”, the broadcaster adds. Those trials also showed them to be “highly effective in preventing Covid hospitalisations or deaths” with studies finding “Sinovac’s jab was 100% effective in Brazil and 96 to 98% effective among Indonesian medical workers”.

However, a study published last week by researchers at the University of Hong Kong found that people inoculated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had antibody levels ten times higher than those who were given the Sinovac jab.

Published in The Lancet, the researchers behind the study called for “alternative strategies” to inoculate populations currently reliant on Chinese-deveoped vaccines, possibly prompting Malaysia’s suspension of the Sinovac jab and calls for booster shots using western-developed vaccines in other Southeast Asian countries.

One possible explanation for the rising infection rates may be that “Chinese vaccines, like many other vaccines, may wane in efficacy over time”, the BBC says. A joint study between Thailand’s Thammasat University’s Faculty of Medicine and the National Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology last week revealed that antibody levels in people fully vaccinated with the Sinovac vaccine decline by half every 40 days.

Another suggestion “is that the clinical trials had smaller datasets compared to real-world infections”, the broadcaster adds, “particularly in Indonesia which is seeing soaring daily infection numbers in the tens of thousands”.

“For all its problems”, The Diplomat says, “the portable and relatively cost-effective Sinovac vaccine could still play an important role in helping developing countries achieve widespread vaccine distribution” if combined with booster shots.

But “the potentially weak efficacy” against the strain that now dominates global infections “poses a challenge for Southeast Asian nations, which are struggling to secure ample supplies of the more effective mRNA vaccines”, the magazine adds.

And not only will it create a huge public health strain, it will also serve to “take the shine off China’s attempts to leverage its vaccine outreach for strategic gain, eroding the already low levels of public trust in the Chinese jabs”.