Indonesia satisfied with effectiveness of Chinese vaccine

Indonesia satisfied with effectiveness of Chinese vaccine

SeattlePI.com

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BEIJING (AP) — Indonesia's government says it is satisfied with the effectiveness of the Chinese coronavirus vaccine it has been using, after China’s top disease control official acknowledged that current vaccines offer low protection against the virus.

Siti Nadia Tarmizi, a spokesperson for Indonesia’s COVID-19 vaccine program, said Monday that the World Health Organization had found the Chinese vaccines had met requirements by being more than 50% effective. She noted that clinical trials in Indonesia for the vaccine from Chinese drugmaker Sinovac showed it was 65% effective.

“It means ... the ability to form antibodies in our bodies is still very good,” she said.

Researchers who conducted Sinovac’s clinical trials in Brazil released new data Monday that confirmed the company’s previously announced efficacy rate of about 50%. The paper, which was published on a website for scientists and has not yet been peer reviewed, showed that the vaccine was 50.7% effective against symptomatic COVID-19 cases and much stronger against severe ones.

Gao Fu, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a conference 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...

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