Coronavirus vaccine ‘will be ready by early next year’
24 September 2020, 16:04
SinoVac chief executive Yin Weidong said he has been given the experimental vaccine.
A Chinese pharmaceutical company has said the coronavirus vaccine it is developing should be ready by early 2021 for distribution worldwide.
Yin Weidong, the chief executive of SinoVac, vowed to apply to the US Food and Drug Administration to sell CoronaVac there if it passes its third and final round of testing in humans.
Mr Yin said he has been given the experimental vaccine.
“At the very beginning, our strategy was designed for China and for Wuhan,” he said.
“Soon after that in June and July we adjusted our strategy, that is to face the world.
“Our goal is to provide the vaccine to the world, including the US, EU and others.”
Stringent regulations in the US, EU, Japan and Australia have historically blocked the sale of Chinese vaccines but Mr Yin said that could change.
SinoVac is developing one of China’s top four vaccine candidates along with state-owned SinoPharm, which has two in development, and military-affiliated private firm CanSino.
More than 24,000 people are currently participating in clinical trials of CoronaVac in Brazil, Turkey and Indonesia, with additional trials scheduled for Bangladesh and possibly Chile, Mr Yin said.
SinoVac chose those countries because they all had serious outbreaks, large populations and limited research and development capacity, he said.
He spoke to reporters during a tour of a SinoVac plant south of Beijing.
Built in a few months from scratch, the plant is designed to enable SinoVac to produce half a million vaccine doses a year.
The bio-secure facility was already busy on Thursday, filling tiny bottles with the vaccine and boxing them.
The company projects it will be able to produce a few hundred million doses of the vaccine by February or March of next year.
SinoVac is also starting to test small doses of CoronaVac on children in the three countries because of the high rate of infection among young people there.
Mr Yin said the company will prioritise distribution of the vaccine to countries hosting human trials of CoronaVac.
While the vaccine has not yet passed the phase three clinical trials, a globally accepted standard, SinoVac has already injected thousands of people in China under an emergency use provision.
Mr Yin said he was one of the first to receive the experimental vaccine months ago along with researchers after phase one and two of human trials showed no serious adverse effects.
He said self-injecting showed his support for CoronaVac.
“This is kind of a tradition of our company,” Mr Yin said, adding he had done the same with a hepatitis vaccine under development.
Earlier this year, China permitted emergency use of vaccine candidates for at-risk populations like border personnel and medical workers if companies could show “good safety and good antibodies” from tests of about 1,000 people, Mr Yin said.
SinoVac received that approval in June along with SinoPharm and CanSino, and was able to provide tens of thousands of doses of CoronaVac to Beijing’s municipal government, he said.
Its employees qualified for emergency use of the vaccine because an outbreak inside the company would cripple its ability to develop a vaccine, he said.
About 90% of the company’s staff have received it.
“We are confident that our research of the Covid-19 vaccines can meet the standards of the US and EU countries,” Mr Yin concluded.
