Advertisement
Chinese coronavirus vaccines
ChinaScience

Coronavirus: small Chinese vaccine studies show positive signs against Delta

  • Serum from 28 people given Zhifei Longcom jabs indicates vaccine is about as effective against the original strain as it is against the newer variant
  • Assessment of Guangzhou outbreak also shows Sinovac and Sinopharm shots also helped prevent cases of the disease

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
23
Positive signs of the effectiveness of several Chinese vaccines against the Delta variant of the coronavirus have emerged from two small studies in China. Photo: AFP
Zhuang Pinghui
With the coronavirus largely stopped at China’s borders it can be hard to assess just how well the national vaccination drive is working against the highly transmissible Delta variant of the disease.
Advertisement

But two small peer-reviewed studies indicate that the vaccines might just be effective.

In one study, researchers with the Chinese Academy of Sciences collected 28 serum samples from participants three weeks after they received the full three doses of a vaccine by Anhui Zhifei Longcom Biopharmaceutical.

They tested the serum to see how well the vaccine, known as ZF2001, neutralised several variants of the coronavirus, according to a study published in the journal The Lancet on Friday.

The researchers, who included Gao Fu, head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, found that the serum from people given the vaccine showed roughly equivalent sensitivity against the Epsilon variant, the one first detected in the United States, and the Delta variant, first detected in India, as compared with the ancestral strain first detected in Wuhan.

Advertisement
Advertisement