Sinopharm Covid Vaccine Seen as Less Effective in Bahrain Study from buzai232's blog

Sinopharm Covid Vaccine Seen as Less Effective in Bahrain Study

The Covid-19 vaccine made by China’s Sinopharm was less effective than others at preventing infection, hospitalization and death, especially among people over 50, according to a study by the kingdom of Bahrain and Columbia University researchers.To get more news about sinopharm update, you can visit shine news official website.

Chinese vaccines have become a key tool of Beijing’s international diplomacy, especially in developing nations unable to secure sufficient doses of U.S. and European-made shots. Despite high levels of inoculation with the Sinopharm vaccine, Bahrain in May started giving booster shots to vulnerable citizens using a different shot made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE BNTX -1.87% ▼. It now also offers booster shots for other vaccines.

The study, posted online this week ahead of peer review, shows that all the vaccines administered since December in the Persian Gulf island nation—which also include Covishield, an Indian-made version of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, and the Russian-made Sputnik V—were effective in reducing severe illness compared to the unvaccinated population.

But the percentage of deaths among all PCR positive post-vaccination Covid-19 cases was 0.46% for Sinopharm recipients compared to 0.15% for Pfizer-BioNTech and 0.03% for AstraZeneca, the study showed. That trend was consistent for infection and hospitalization, even with the advent of the Delta variant. Sputnik V results were intermediate.

“They found that there is significant difference between hospitalization, ICU admission and death in favor of Pfizer compared to Sinopharm, especially in older populations and in the context of the emergence of the Delta variant,” said co-author Dr. Jaleela Al-Sayed Jawad.

“This gives a preliminary indication, but it needs further in-depth analysis to say that this is really superior,” said Dr. Jawad, who is chief executive of Bahrain’s primary healthcare centers and helped roll out its vaccination campaign. The paper is under consideration at a Nature Portfolio journal.Julian Tang, a clinical virologist and professor of respiratory medicine at the University of Leicester, said that while there are notable differences between vaccines’ effectiveness against different variants, it could be misleading to compare outcomes in sequential or overlapping rollouts without more data on comorbidities and pre-vaccination infections.

“Vaccines earlier in the rollout may have had less natural infection than vaccines later in the vaccine rollout,” said Dr. Tang, who is unaffiliated with the Bahrain study.

Sinopharm, along with another shot manufactured by China’s Sinovac Biotech Ltd., has already received emergency approval from the World Health Organization, though published clinical data on its efficiency among the population groups most vulnerable to severe disease remains scant.

The two vaccines are manufactured with inactivated virus, a long-used technique for making vaccines. The Pfizer-BioNTech shot relies on a new technology employing messenger RNA.

Bahrain, one of the world’s early vaccination leaders, has fully vaccinated 66% of its population, more than the 52% vaccination rate in the U.S. It has reported some 272,000 infections and 1,388 deaths in a population of around 1.5 million. The Sinopharm vaccine was deployed there earlier than other vaccines and at a rate three times higher than the Pfizer-BioNTech shot.

The study acknowledges that the vaccines’ staggered rollouts and an oversampling of individuals who received the Chinese-made shot could have impacted the results, but researchers concluded that such factors were unlikely to explain the highly significant differences in outcomes.

Dr. Sayed said the direct comparison between Sinopharm and Pfizer was possible because of similar age and sex characteristics among recipients, calling the study “a unique resource on the impact of various vaccines in one population.”

Peter English, a retired consultant in communicable disease control, said the quantity of variables in the study created potential for misinterpretation but that its conclusions appeared to be sound.