Graphics: TP
With Serbia and Turkey, European countries are now also relying on the Sera from Sinopharm and Sinovac
Yesterday BioNTech published the results of a study in which the company exposed the blood of BNT162b2 vaccinated people to an artificial virus that has ten “characteristic” features of the British Sars CoV-2 mutation B.1.1.7. These artificial viruses were fought by the antibodies generated by the vaccination, as was the Chinese (or perhaps Italian) variant, for which BioNTech developed its mRNA serum.
Made the best way with an inactivated virus
Such an effect is possible with the vaccines of the other companies, but unclear. However, they have the advantage that they are cheaper, less perishable and, above all, more readily available than the serum from BioNTech and Pfizer, which will not be delivered to EU countries in January in the quantities that the companies had promised.
Many countries are therefore also using other vaccines: Serbia, for example, has been vaccinating not only with BNT162b2 and the Russian vector virus vaccine Sputnik V since Tuesday, but also as the first European country with the serum from the Chinese company Sinopharm, which has been produced in a tried and tested manner with an inactivated virus.
The government of the country of seven million has ordered seven million doses of the agent, which is also used in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Peru and has an effectiveness of 79 percent. Sinopharm has already delivered a million of these. According to Serbian Health Minister Zlatibor Lončar, this is “the only way to return to a normal life”.
Sinovac: Doubts about the degree of effectiveness
In addition to Sinopharm, the Chinese company Sinovac has also developed a vaccine with an inactivated virus that it calls “CoronaVac”. In Turkey, where a million people were immunized with it in the past week, A study with 29 cases confirmed that it was 91.25 percent effective.
In Indonesia, where CoronaVac is also already approved, with around 1,600 cases, the figure was only 65.3 percent. Brazilian scientists believe that this is still too high. According to your results published yesterday, the effectiveness of the serum is 50.4 percent, just above the minimum effectiveness required by the World Health Organization.
The Singapore city-state government, which ordered the vaccine, has not yet approved it. The northern neighboring government in Malaysia also wants to wait for further data on this serum. A country further north, in Thailand, however, Sinovac operations are expected to start in February.
In India, where the government has a rather tense relationship with the Chinese, the local company Bharat Biotech has had government support to develop its own vector virus vaccine: BBV152. Although there are no data on its effectiveness yet, the Indian government wants to supply not only the 1.35 billion inhabitant giant, but also its neighbors.
So that they can take it safely, she has offered it to the governments of Bangladesh, Burma, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Mauritius, the Maldives, and the Seychelles free of charge. The government of Pakistan, hostile to India, is not among them – and would probably not take him either, because otherwise it would immediately have to fight Islamist conspiracy theories.
(Peter Mühlbauer)
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