Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley an­nounced this week that Chi­na had promised the coun­try 100,000 dos­es of Sinopharm COVID-19 vac­cines once the vac­cine gets the nod from the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO).

Cre­at­ed by Sino­vac Biotech in Bei­jing, Chi­na, Sinopharm is an in­ac­ti­vat­ed vac­cine. It takes the dis­ease-car­ry­ing virus or one very sim­i­lar to it and in­ac­ti­vates or kills it us­ing chem­i­cals, heat or ra­di­a­tion.

Ac­cord­ing to WHO, this type of vac­cine “us­es tech­nol­o­gy that’s been proven to work in peo­ple— this is the way the flu and po­lio vac­cines are made—and vac­cines can be man­u­fac­tured on a rea­son­able scale. How­ev­er, it re­quires spe­cial lab­o­ra­to­ry fa­cil­i­ties to grow the virus or bac­teri­um safe­ly, can have a rel­a­tive­ly long pro­duc­tion time, and will like­ly re­quire two or three dos­es to be ad­min­is­tered.”

It’s hard to say at this point ex­act­ly how ef­fi­ca­cious the vac­cine is but ac­cord­ing to Sino­vac, the jab has an ef­fi­ca­cy rate of 79 per cent, al­though it has not re­leased its da­ta to the pub­lic.

But there are vary­ing re­ports of its ef­fi­ca­cy com­ing from some of the coun­tries which have ap­proved it for emer­gency use. There are 27 coun­tries that have giv­en it such ap­proval. These are Ar­genti­na, Bahrain, Be­larus, Bo­livia, Cam­bo­dia, Chi­na, Egypt, Equa­to­r­i­al Guinea, Guyana, Hun­gary, Iran, Iraq, Jor­dan, Laos, Mal­dives, Mon­tene­gro, Mo­roc­co, Mozam­bique, Nepal, Pak­istan, Pe­ru, Re­pub­lic of Ser­bia, Sene­gal, Sey­chelles, Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, Venezuela and Zim­bab­we.

Much like most vac­cines be­ing ad­min­is­tered glob­al­ly, like the Ox­ford-As­traZeneca, Pfiz­er-BioN­Tech and Mod­er­na, the Sinopharm jab re­quires two dos­es. How­ev­er, ac­cord­ing to re­ports com­ing out of the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, there may need to be a third dose. This af­ter it was no­ticed that in a small num­ber of peo­ple, it didn’t have the de­sired im­mune re­sponse.

Ac­cord­ing to glob­al re­ports, the Ox­ford-As­traZeneca vac­cine has an ef­fi­ca­cy rate of around 80 per cent, the Mod­er­na vac­cine around 94.1 per cent and the Pfiz­er-BioN­Tech vac­cine around 95 per cent.

Ac­cord­ing to a WHO guid­ance doc­u­ment pub­lished on Tues­day, a de­ci­sion is ex­pect­ed to be made on Sinopharm’s ap­proval is ex­pect­ed “ear­li­est April.”