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Zhuang Pinghui

The head of China’s disease control centre has become a coronavirus vaccine guinea pig, taking a dose of an experimental inoculation to boost public confidence in domestic research.
George Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said on Friday that he decided to become an experimental “mouse in animal model” in response to unverified assertions and hesitancy about Covid-19 vaccines.
“For me, the injection of the vaccine is related to ‘infodemic’,” Gao told an online seminar hosted by Peking University and the private non-profit National Committee on United States-China Relations.
“There are a lot of debates or people claiming that the antibodies of the survivors … might not be able to protect [them from another infection]. Your vaccination may be a waste of efforts.
Coronavirus: China customs stalls shipment for Canada vaccine trials
“But this is a new virus and we don’t know that.”
He said he also wanted to boost confidence in vaccine candidates developed in China, where the pharmaceutical industry has been riddled with vaccine scandals.
“There is [doubt] that we can really produce a vaccine ourselves within such a short time. That’s why I put myself forward as a mouse in animal model … to say these words: I am confident. I am healthy. I am all right,” Gao said, without saying which vaccine candidate he took.


Developers in China are pursuing four types of technologies – inactivated, virus-vectored, mRNA and recombinant protein – in the race for a vaccine for Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Gao and his colleagues in the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed a potential recombinant protein vaccine that is in phase II of clinical trials.
The CDC chief is not the first Chinese scientist to take a dose of an experimental vaccine.
Major General Chen Wei from the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, whose team developed a Covid-19 vaccine with Tianjin-based firm CanSino Biologics, injected herself with their candidate before doses were given to phase I volunteers.
Debate over infecting volunteers with Covid-19 enters uncharted territory
And Liu Jingzhen, Communist Party secretary of state-owned Sinopharm Group, was one of 180 senior executives to get shots of one of two inactivated vaccines developed by the group’s subsidiaries.
The executives were given the injections before human trials to show they were safe and caused an immune response.
In all, roughly 1,000 employees of the group have taken the experimental vaccines, which are in phase III human trials.


During the seminar, Gao also said that scientists from China and the United State should team up to fight Covid-19.
“If we don’t work together the virus will work together, and probably in future we might have another Covid-20 … We have to keep up dialogue to keep the openness, transparency and cooperation,” he said.
Thirteen companies in China are building facilities to ramp up vaccine production and Sinopharm’s inactivated vaccines are expected to be ready for the market by the end of this year or early next year.
Gao said countries needed to work together to find ways to distribute the vaccines, which China deemed a public good.
“We [have] got to share this public product. We need to find a way ... to share the vaccine in some areas, like low and middle-income countries where they need vaccines but can’t afford [them],” he said.



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Coronavirus pandemic

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Chinese CDC chief Gao Fu says he has taken a dose of an experimental vaccine. Photo: AP

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Canada has agreed to host clinical trials of a potential coronavirus vaccine developed by China’s CanSino Biologics. Photo: CanSino Biologic s

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Chinese vaccine maker CanSino Biologics' sign on its building in Tianjin on November 20, 2018. Photo Reuters

Co-Founder of CanSino Biologics Qiu Dongxu delivers a speech on the progress of company's coronavirus vaccine candidate at the China Anti-viral Drug Innovation Summit, following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, China July 11, 2020. REUTERS/Roxanne Liu NO ARCHIVE. NO RESALES.

Coronavirus vaccine for COVID-19 developed by ChinaÕs CanSino Biologics. Photo: CanSino Biologics

Coronavirus vaccine success to hinge on global immunisation programme

A woman takes part in a Covid-19 vaccine trial in the central China city of Wuhan in April. Photo: dpa

Nurse Kathe Olmstead, right, gives volunteer Melissa Harting, of Harpersville, N.Y., an injection as the world's biggest study of a possible COVID-19 vaccine, developed by the National Institutes of Health and Moderna Inc., gets underway Monday, July 27, 2020, in Binghamton, N.Y. (AP Photo/Hans Pennink)

FILE PHOTO: Small bottles labbeled with a "Vaccine COVID-19" sticker and a medical syringe are seen in this illustration taken taken April 10, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

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The D614G strain of the coronavirus is rarely found in China. Photo: AP

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China’s leading infectious disease expert Zhong Nanshan. Photo: Thomas Yau

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China

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Gao Fu says he had the injection to try to boost public confidence in the country’s ability to produce a vaccine
China and the United States need to work together to find an answer to Covid-19, he says



Gao Fu says he had the injection to try to boost public confidence in the country’s ability to produce a vaccine.
