Indonesia has become the first country outside of China to approve the emergency use of a Covid-19 vaccine developed by Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech Ltd., despite findings that place the candidate’s effectiveness among the lowest for new coronavirus vaccines.
Indonesia’s food and drug agency said on Monday that an advanced clinical trial in the large city of Bandung showed that Sinovac’s CoronaVac vaccine is 65.3% effective. This compares with the results of clinical trials conducted in Brazil last week, showing that the vaccine had an 78% effectiveness rate.
The Indonesian trial showed CoronaVac to be safe, with participants experiencing only minor side effects, such as fatigue and fever, according to Penny Lukito, head of the Indonesian National Agency for Food and Drug Control. “Hopefully, vaccines for Covid-19 will be one of the factors in overcoming this pandemic,” she said.
A rate of 65% exceeds the limit of 50% that the World Health Organization and many regulatory authorities consider necessary for widespread use. Western vaccines developed by Moderna Inc. and jointly by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE have reported that their vaccines are more than 90% effective; another developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca PLC was at least 62% effective, according to the team.
Authorities in Brazil have yet to approve the use of CoronaVac, although President Jair Bolsonaro’s government has backed down from its earlier criticisms of Chinese vaccines and agreed to buy up to 100 million doses of the vaccine.