China to use BioNTech vaccine as booster shot, sources say

[Mista]

China to use BioNTech vaccine as booster shot, sources say

Joint venture with Fosun Pharma to make 100m to 200m vaccines a month

asia.nikkei.com

Chinese drug regulators completed an expert panel review of a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine co-developed by Fosun Pharma and Germany's BioNTech, and now the shot is in the administrative review stage, according to Fosun.

The Shanghai-based pharmaceutical company is sticking with its previously announced plan to start domestic trial production by the end of August, Fosun Chairman Wu Yifang said Wednesday at a shareholders meeting.

Chinese authorities plan to use the vaccine, which goes by the brand name Comirnaty, as a booster shot for people who have received inactivated-virus vaccines, people close to regulators told Caixin. The booster shot is likely to be offered free of charge.

China has administered more than 1.2 billion vaccine doses, as of July 1, according to the National Health Commission. Most people have received inactivated-virus vaccines made by Sinovac and state-owned Sinopharm Group that have demonstrated lower efficacy than mRNA vaccines.

While awaiting regulatory clearance, Fosun Pharma and BioNTech started preparations and bought equipment for their Shanghai-based joint venture. Installation of production lines in the Shanghai plant is set to be completed in August, Fosun said in June.

Fosun and BioNTech in May announced plans to set up the Shanghai facility to produce BioNTech's mRNA vaccine Comirnaty, also known as BNT162b2. The venture is part of a broader partnership formed in early 2020 to bring the vaccine to China.

Wu said the Shanghai factory will hit its annual production capacity of 1 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccine by the end of this year. With the assistance of Fosun's other facilities, monthly output can expand to 100 million to 200 million doses, Wu said.

Fosun sealed a deal to sell 10 million vaccine doses to Taiwan following months of on-again, off-again talks that finally reached a breakthrough after the island experienced a recent COVID-19 outbreak.

The University of Hong Kong is studying the effect of mixing shots of BioNTech's Comirnaty and one made by Sinovac Life Sciences. Fosun and the Chinese government are also conducting vaccine-mixing research. The currently available data suggest favorable results, Wu said.

The efficacy of the Chinese shots ranges from 50% to almost 80% in trials and real-world studies, significantly lower than the mRNA vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech. That has raised concerns they may not be effective in taming the virus's more infectious variants.

The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines cover all existing variants and can provide a high degree of protection, although with reduced effectiveness, said Jin Dongyan, a molecular virologist at the University of Hong Kong.


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Read also the original story.

Caixinglobal.com is the English-language online news portal of Chinese financial and business news media group Caixin. Nikkei recently agreed with the company to exchange articles in English.

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

None of these are Singaporean vaccines as you might know.

 

[Mista]

复必泰完成专家评审 加强针传言引热议 – DW – 2021年7月15日

据中国媒体报道，由德国BioNtech公司研发，中国复兴医药引进的mRNA新冠疫苗“复必泰”已完成专家评审，有知情者透露会作为加强针在中国国内免费接种。复兴医药CEO吴以芳称,香港大学正在进行复必泰与科兴灭活新冠疫苗间的混打研究。

www.dw.com

https://www.weibo.com/search?containerid=231522type%3D1%26q%3D%23%E5%A4%8D%E5%BF%85%E6%B3%B0%E6%9C%89%E6%9C%9B%E6%88%90%E4%B8%BA%E5%9B%BD%E5%86%85%E5%8A%A0%E5%BC%BA%E9%92%88%23%26t%3D3

@8888888888888

 

[dbc]

Thanks @Mista this should shut the Chinese troll brigade up. Good news for Pfizer I suppose.

 

[8888888888888]

It's the made in China German BioNTech vaccine, not made in USA pfizer. Much safer and properly tested out while the inactive vaccines will be use more. Will only be use as a booster since it is unknown if it is safe long term.

 

[nang2]

It's the made in China German BioNTech vaccine, not made in USA pfizer. Much safer and properly tested out while the inactive vaccines will be use more. Will only be use as a booster since it is unknown if it is safe long term.

Reference needed. And wait, "while the inactive vaccines will be use more"?!

 

[HalfMoon]

COVID is a scam. All Muslims should stay away from all vaccines.

 

[Dark1]

It's the made in China German BioNTech vaccine, not made in USA pfizer. Much safer and properly tested out while the inactive vaccines will be use more. Will only be use as a booster since it is unknown if it is safe long term.

Why is China with its highly developed pharmaceutical industry importing vaccines from Germany ? Not using a Chinese manufacturer's booster shot ?
Not clear. Pl explain.

 

[HalfMoon]

Why is China with its highly developed pharmaceutical industry importing vaccines from Germany ? Not using a Chinese manufacturer's booster shot ?
Not clear. Pl explain.

Germany is supporting China by joining Chinese BRI.

So China is returning the favor by procuring German made Vaccines.

It is a Win-Win for both Germany & China.

 

[Mista]

Report: China Plans BioNTech Booster for Its Population

The report from Caixin comes as the efficacy of homegrown vaccines from Sinopharm and Sinovac continue to be questioned.

thediplomat.com

Report: China Plans BioNTech Booster for Its Population

Chinese media outlet Caixin is reporting that China plans to use an mRNA vaccine, jointly developed by China’s Fosun Pharma and German company BioNTech, as a booster shot for those who have been fully vaccinated using Chinese vaccines.

“Chinese authorities plan to use the vaccine, which goes by the brand name Comirnaty, as a booster shot for people who have received inactivated-virus vaccines, people close to regulators told Caixin,” according to the report. The vaccines produced by Chinese companies – including China’s two leading COVID-19 vaccine producers, Sinopharm and Sinovac – both use inactivated particles of the virus, rather than the newer mRNA technology, to produce an immune response.

The Comirnaty vaccine is being widely used in developed countries, including the United States. In much of the world, it is a joint production with U.S. firm Pfizer, but Fosun has exclusive rights to manufacture and distribute the vaccine within China (a point that has caused some headaches for Taiwan).

The BioNTech vaccine is currently awaiting government approval in China. An advisory panel just cleared the vaccine for use on Thursday, and now it is awaiting final approval from the National Medical Products Administration. Fosun hopes to start trial production by the end of August, according to a shareholder’s meeting this week

The BioNTech vaccine is 95 percent effective at preventing COVID-19, according to trial data. That efficacy has held up well even against the ferocious new Delta variant, which spreads over 200 percent more quickly than the original strain of the virus. The BioNTech vaccine was reported to be 84 percent effective at preventing infection from the Delta strain and 96 percent effective at preventing hospitalizations. However, that level of protection only comes after receiving two shots of the vaccine, the recommended dose.

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China is still studying what levels of protection are possible by recombining vaccines, something first raised by Gao Fu, the head of China’s Center for Disease Control, back in April. At the time, Gao said that Chinese vaccines “don’t have very high protection rates” and added that officials are considering “whether we should use different vaccines from different technical lines for the immunization process.”

Gao’s comments, which he later tried to walk back, added fuel to the fire of speculation about the efficiency of Chinese-made vaccines. Data from various trials of Sinopharm and Sinovac shots had suggested efficacy levels of anywhere between 50 and 80 percent, but full data has not been released so far. And that’s only for the original strain of the virus – neither Sinopharm nor Sinovac has released data from trials involving the Delta variant as of this writing.

But there is some concerning real-world evidence that Chinese vaccines are not enough to guard against an outbreak of the Delta variant. In the Seychelles, 72.7 percent of the population has received at least one dose of vaccine, and as of May, 57 percent of its administered vaccines were from Sinopharm. Yet daily cases counts reached an all-time high for the Seychelles in May, and the country is still notching over 1,000 new cases per million people each day. By comparison, at the worst of their respective outbreaks, the U.S., U.K., and India never topped the 1,000-cases-per-million daily mark. The Seychelles has confirmed that a third of new COVID-19 cases in the country are occurring among fully vaccinated people, although it hasn’t revealed data on which vaccines were used in those cases (the Seychelles also uses the AstraZeneca vaccine).

Likewise, in Indonesia, currently the COVID-19 hotspot in the Asia-Pacific, as of mid-June over 350 doctors and nurses had been infected with COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated with Sinovac. This week, the Indonesian government announced that it will give healthcare workers a third vaccine dose, this time using the Moderna mRNA vaccine, to shore up protection.

But perhaps the best case for skepticism over the efficiency of Chinese vaccines comes from China itself. China, despite having administered over 1.4 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines to date, has no plans to relax its border restrictions until at least 2022. That alone suggests less than full confidence in the protection provided by China’s vaccination drive, which may be why the country is now considering administering booster shots using an entirely different vaccine technology.

 

[obj 705A]

The vaccine is called the Fosun–BioNTech COVID‑19 vaccine not just "BionTech vaccine", funny how certain people who worship the US call the the Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine just the "Pfizer vaccine" because Pfizer is an American company but when it comes to the one co-developed and produced with the Chinese company Fosun they chose to call it the BioNTech vaccine instead of calling it the Fosun vaccine like what they do with the American one.

 

[redtom]

BNT would not pass government approval. Any vaccine used in China must be held responsible for side effects, and Pfizer has refused to accept any responsibility. What is more important in China is that this involves not only economic compensation, but also considerable political liability. No one will vouch for BNT.

 

[Menthol]

For mRNA vaccine, I prefer to wait and see.

I think the second or third generation of mRNA vaccine is probably safer.

 

[Globenim]

Ah yes rumors by Japanese state propaganda-

"Confirmed" by a English language "Chinese" media outlet officially and almost exclusively partnered with U.S. and the exact same Japanese state propaganda mouthpieces it just "publishes" i.e. launders propaganda for so U.S. media can label it "Chinese media reports" similar to how U.S. based reports from SCMP and RFA turn into "local press" and a long history of parotting American disinfo to undermine China without scrutiny just like our American trolls.

A rumor about a Made in China vaccine using possibly German tech to "some extend". Finally the American trolls won!

 

[CAPRICORN-88]

Ah yes rumors by Japanese state propaganda-

"Confirmed" by a English language "Chinese" media outlet officially and almost exclusively partnered with U.S. and the exact same Japanese state propaganda mouthpieces it just "publishes" i.e. launders propaganda for so U.S. media can label it "Chinese media reports" similar to how U.S. based reports from SCMP and RFA turn into "local press" and a long history of parotting American disinfo to undermine China without scrutiny just like our American trolls.

A rumor about a Made in China vaccine using possibly German tech to "some extend". Finally the American trolls won!

Yes. Stop wasting your time reading all these political vaccines rumors.

There are no new local community outbreak in China and so used our commonsense instead.