Sinovac and Sinopharm companies are the leading vaccine manufacturers in China. And both vaccines have been approved by the World Health Organization (WHO) to fight COVID-19.
Sinovac is a private company, while Sinopharm is managed by the government. Chinese scientists used the same method to make both vaccines.
Dr. Andrea Cox, professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said for such vaccines, scientists take a virus or bacteria, inactivate or kill it, and inject it into people. Because the virus is dead, it can’t infect anyone. Then, when someone who has been vaccinated is exposed to a live virus, their body recognizes it and fights it. However, Cox says, there are drawbacks.
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“The problem is that these inactivated vaccines elicit a different type of immune response and are slightly less effective…. The Sinovac vaccine has been tested and shown to have varying protection, but is not as effective as some of the other vaccines out there,” he said.
The WHO says the Sinovac vaccine is about 50 percent effective. Sinovac said the vaccine significantly reduced the severity of COVID-19 infections.
The efficacy of Sinopharm is higher. The WHO reports the vaccine is 78 percent effective.
Two doses are required for both vaccines. To be more effective, vaccines are often mixed with adjuvants or harmless additives such as aluminum salts or fats.
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On its website, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says, “Aluminum is one of the most common metals found in nature and is present in air, food and water,” so (aluminum) is not a foreign or hazardous material, although groups anti-vaccine claims it does. For example, Sinovac uses aluminum hydroxide, an ingredient that is also used to treat stomach aches.
The Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines have a major advantage over other COVID vaccines, namely that they are easy to store and require only regular refrigeration.
That facilitates the distribution of the COVID vaccine to communities in remote areas.
“In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need it, but at this point, we need a way to get the world vaccinated quickly and effectively, and may require the use of vaccines that we know are not very good but are better than not being vaccinated at all.”
WHO says safe and effective vaccines are the way to go. But for now and in the future, WHO recommends wearing masks, washing hands more often, good ventilation in spaces, maintaining physical distance and avoiding crowds.
And most importantly, get the COVID-19 vaccine with any vaccine available.
Cox says we are lucky because many governments in the world are investing in vaccines and many top scientists are making vaccines.
“The best scientists in the world figuring out how to make effective vaccines and deliver them to the global population is critical. The more data we get from these vaccines, the more we can choose a vaccine that can protect a large part of the world’s population.”
The WHO says it’s not the type of vaccine that will stop the pandemic, but vaccination. [vm/jm]
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