The Indonesian government has said it is satisfied with the effectiveness of the Chinese COVID-19 vaccine it has been using, after China’s top disease control official said that current vaccines offer low protection against the novel coronavirus.
Siti Nadia Tarmizi, a spokesperson for Indonesia’s COVID-19 vaccine program, on Monday said the WHO had found that the Chinese vaccines had met requirements by being more than 50 percent effective.
Clinical trials in Indonesia for the vaccine from Chinese drugmaker Sinovac showed that it was 65 percent effective, she said.
“It means ... the ability to form antibodies in our bodies is still very good,” she added.
Researchers who conducted Sinovac’s clinical trials in Brazil released new data that confirmed the company’s previously announced efficacy rate of about 50 percent.
The paper, which was published on a Web site for scientists and has not yet been peer reviewed, showed that the vaccine was 50.7 percent effective against symptomatic COVID-19 cases and much stronger against severe ones.
Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention Director Gao Fu (高福) told a conference on Saturday that existing COVID-19 vaccines had low effectiveness rates and mixing vaccines is among strategies being considered to boost their effectiveness.
Those comments appeared to run counter to China’s official narrative that has tried to promote the country’s vaccines and at times discredit its Western counterparts.
China has distributed hundreds of millions of doses of domestically made vaccines abroad and is relying on them for its own mass immunization campaign.
Tarmizi said Indonesia would wait to see the results of any clinical trials before considering mixing vaccines.
“We are going to wait, waiting for the clinical trial to ensure the idea or innovation will have better effectiveness, immunogenicity, and efficacy level compared to the current condition,” she said.
Experts have said mixing vaccines, or sequential immunization, might boost effectiveness.
Researchers in the UK are studying a possible combination of the Pfizer and the AstraZeneca vaccines.
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