China's Vaccine Diplomacy In Question As Countries Using Sinopharm, Sinovac Jabs Witness Surge In Covid Cases

China’s Sinopharm vaccine has an efficacy rate of 78.1 per cent while the Sinovac vaccine has an efficacy rate of 51 per cent.

(Representative Image/Getty)

Washington: Several nations, including Mongolia, Seychelles and Bahrain, which had relied on the Chinese Covid-19 vaccines to combat the pandemic and bring back normalcy, are now battling a surge in infections.

The examples from several countries suggest the Chinese vaccines may not be very effective at preventing the spread of the virus, particularly the new variants, The New York Times (NYT) reported.

According to Our World in Data -  a data-tracking project - about 50 to 68 percent of the populations have been fully inoculated in Seychelles, Chile, Bahrain and Mongolia with the Chinese vaccines, outpacing the United States.

Jin Dongyan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, said “if the vaccines are sufficiently good, we should not see this pattern”.

Dongyan added the “Chinese have a responsibility to remedy this”.

Meanwhile, scientists have expressed uncertainty over how countries with relatively high inoculation rates are suffering new outbreaks pointed out to relaxing of social controls and careless behaviour.

Asserting it did not see a link between the recent outbreaks and its vaccines, China’s Foreign Ministry in a statement recently said: “Relevant reports and data also show that many countries that use Chinese-made vaccines have expressed that they are safe and reliable, and have played a good role in their epidemic prevention efforts.”

The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines have efficacy rates of more than 90 percent.

China’s Sinopharm vaccine has an efficacy rate of 78.1 per cent while the Sinovac vaccine has an efficacy rate of 51 per cent.

The Chinese companies have also not released much clinical data to show how their vaccines work at preventing transmission.

Vanderbilt University’s National Foundation for Infectious Diseases Medical Director William Schaffner said the efficacy rates of Chinese shots could be low enough “to sustain some transmission, as well as create illness of a substantial amount in the highly vaccinated population, even though it keeps people largely out of the hospital”.