China has administered coronavirus vaccine candidates to some medical workers and border inspection officials since July, a senior Chinese health official said on Saturday, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported.
The Chinese government authorized the “emergency use” of what it claimed to be an experimental vaccine for selected groups of essential workers on July 22, Zheng Zhongwei, director of the Chinese National Health Commission (NHC)’s Development Center for Medical Science and Technology, said in an interview with state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) on Saturday night.
Zheng also heads an expert panel that advises the Chinese government on coronavirus. He said the government’s decision to begin administering the vaccine candidate to certain groups of people was “in line with the law.”
“According to China’s Law on Vaccine Management, when a particularly severe public health emergency occurs, vaccines in clinical trials can be used in a limited scope to protect medical and epidemic prevention personnel, border officers, and other people working in stable city operations,” Zheng explained in his CCTV interview, as paraphrased by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) mouthpiece Global Times.
“Four of the seven vaccine candidates undergoing final phase testing around the world are manufactured by Chinese companies,” according to the SCMP. Zheng did not say which specific vaccine candidate had been used with Chinese essential workers since July, nor did he specify how many people had received the vaccine candidate so far.
The Communist Party has claimed to be developing several vaccine candidates but kept the global scientific community in the dark about the process of creating them.
The next step, according to Zheng, was for the Chinese government to extend the vaccine candidate program to more people before the start of the fall and winter seasons, when the number of coronavirus infections may spike.
In the future, Chinese officials hope to expand the program to include people working in the transportation and service industries and at food markets, which would hopefully create an “immunity barrier,” Zheng added.
“[T]he NHC began considering the use of the emergency rule [to administer a vaccine still in clinical trials] in April but it was not until June 24 that it was given approval to implement it,” the SCMP noted.
“A day earlier, China National Biotec Group (CNBG) was given the green light to begin phase three testing of one of its vaccine candidates in the United Arab Emirates [UAE]. The state-owned company has also been approved to carry out trials in Bahrain, Peru, Morocco, and Argentina,” according to the report.
CNBG chairman Yang Xiaoming said in the same CCTV interview on Saturday night as Zheng that over 20,000 people in the UAE had received what he described as “inactivated” coronavirus vaccines developed by CNBG’s Sinopharm in phase three clinical trials.
“The situation regarding the 20,000 volunteers [after being inoculated] shows our vaccines are safe and there have been almost no reports of people suffering side effects,” Yang said.
On August 20 and 21, Sinopharm signed cooperation agreements on phase three clinical trials of inactivated vaccines with Peru, Morocco, and Argentina, according to Chinese state propaganda.
On June 28, the Global Times reported that employees of Chinese state-owned enterprises preparing to travel abroad and Chinese frontline medical workers had been offered “two choices of domestic inactivated vaccine candidates developed by Sinopharm for urgent use.”
Other Chinese companies involved in final-stage clinical trials of coronavirus vaccines are “Sinovac — in Brazil and Indonesia — and CanSino Biologics in Russia,” according to the SCMP. The CanSino vaccine candidate was developed in cooperation with China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences and was approved in June for use among military personnel.
“[T]he Chinese military has begun mass vaccinations but has not released details,” Tao Lina, a Shanghai-based immunology expert, told the Global Times on Sunday.