Chinese vaccine developer Sinovac calls for concerted global effort to deal with future pandemics

The world must learn from the Covid-19 pandemic and ensure efforts are coordinated from the start to nip any outbreak in the bud, Sinovac’s Yin Weidong says

Early investment in development and manufacturing of a new vaccine is the best tool to tackle a severe disease outbreak, Yin says

Reading Time:2 minutes

The CoronaVac vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech. Photo: EPA-EFE

Published: 7:00am, 30 Mar 2021Updated: 7:00am, 30 Mar 2021

Coordination among global regulators, pharmaceutical firms and investors must be strengthened to accelerate development of vaccines to prevent another potential pandemic like Covid-19 ravaging the world, the CEO of Chinese vaccine developer Sinovac Biotech said.

It is important for all stakeholders to closely interact with each other right at the start of an outbreak, Yin Weidong, who is also the chairman and president, told the China Health Investment Conference last week.

“In the race against an unknown infectious disease, humans have lessons to draw from the Covid-19 [pandemic], which was to rev up technology development to find a cure as soon as possible,” he said.

Beijing-based Sinovac was among the first three Chinese pharmaceutical companies whose vaccines were approved by mainland regulators to offer protection against Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei province in December 2019. Since being declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization in March last year, the virus has infected more than 127 million people worldwide and claimed nearly 2.8 million lives.

Yin Weidong, CEO of Sinovac Biotech, said the company was on track to produce 2 billion doses of CoronaVac vaccines by June. Photo: Bloomberg

Sinovac’s CoronaVac was developed using traditional technology. The inactivated virus vaccine showed an efficacy rate of 83.5 per cent in a phase three trial in Turkey, while in Brazil the rate was just above 50 per cent.

Yin said the phase three trials in Brazil focused on health care workers who were at high risk of infection. They were offered two shots of the vaccine with a two-week interval in between, which he said was the riskiest choice for vaccine evaluation because the protection rate could be at its lowest.

Select Voice

Choose your listening speed

Get through articles 2x faster

1.25x

250 WPM

Slow

Average

Fast

00:0000:00

1.25x