Opinion | Why China’s bet on ‘analogue’ Covid-19 vaccines could pay off
- Three of the candidate vaccines developed in China use an old-fashioned technique, but they were among the earliest to enter mass testing
- The inactivated vaccines use a dead version of the Sars-CoV-2 virus rather than more advanced techniques deployed elsewhere
Three of the four Chinese vaccine candidates in the final stage of clinical trials are inactivated vaccines – a simple technique that kills off the Sars-CoV-2 virus in a lab and uses it to trigger an immune response.
One analogy would be that China is making analogue phones while others are developing 4G and 5G smartphones: in this case the more advanced techniques used by Western pharmaceutical companies involve deploying techniques such as use of other live viruses or gene technology.
But this strategy appears to be playing out well. Not only have the Chinese vaccines been among the fastest to reach phase 3 trials, data from the earlier phases showed positive results after all three inactivated vaccines induced antibodies and T-cell responses.
So far they have also shown milder side effects compared to other technologies.