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By Chayut Setboonsarng and Stanley Widianto
BANGKOK / JAKARTA (Reuters) – Indonesia and Thailand plan to offer a booster to their medical workers immunized with Sinovac’s COVID-19 vaccine, a move that could reduce public confidence in the Chinese product that has been their main tool of inoculation.
Some countries, including Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, have already started giving a booster to those who have received Chinese vaccines, fearing they may not be as effective against the newer, more transmissible coronavirus variants.
But the challenges facing Southeast Asia are far greater. Many countries in the region are heavily dependent on Chinese vaccines due to the limited supply of Western products and have low vaccination rates of less than 10%.
They are also battling a record increase in new cases and deaths, led by the highly contagious Delta variant, while the increase in infections among medical staff despite being fully immune with Sinovac injections have stretched already thin health systems.
“There are a lot of doctors and medical workers who have been vaccinated twice but suffered moderate and severe symptoms, or even died,” Slamet Budiarto, deputy head of the Indonesian Medical Association, told parliament on Monday.
Indonesia has vaccinated millions of its healthcare workers with the Sinovac vaccine and thousands of them are now testing positive for COVID-19. [L3N2OJ0F8]
“It’s time for medical workers to get a third recall to protect them from the impact of new, more vicious and disturbing variants,” said Melki Laka Lena, deputy chairman of the parliamentary committee overseeing health.
Siti Nadia Tarmizi, an official with the Indonesian Ministry of Health, said she was awaiting recommendations from the Immunization Advisory Group and the Indonesian Food and Medicines Agency (BPOM) regarding the use of a recall.
While some real-world data has shown that the Sinovac vaccine is effective against hospitalization and severe cases of COVID-19, there is not yet detailed data on its effectiveness against the Delta variant, first identified. times in India.
Thailand, which expects to receive a donation of 1.5 million Pfizer-BioNtech injections from the United States later this month, plans to use it to vaccinate its 700,000 medical workers, most of whom have already received two injections of Sinovac.
Senior health official Udom Kachintorn said the plan was aimed at increasing immunity as the Delta variant increased the number of cases and dozens of medical workers who had been fully vaccinated with Sinovac were infected.
A leak of a Thai health ministry document this week showed the government was concerned that such a move could send the wrong signal to the public because it would admit the Sinovac vaccine was not effective.
“It will definitely impact confidence in the vaccine,” said Dicky Budiman, epidemiologist at Griffith University in Australia.
“The vaccine is not necessarily ineffective, but its effectiveness decreases after six months. That is my prediction,” he said, recommending authorities consider a booster as a solution and communicate the problems to the public.
Thai authorities have defended the use of the vaccine and its plan to buy more Sinovac vaccines.
“Don’t downgrade Sinovac even though we know the efficacy is lower. It reduces the number of critically ill patients and deaths,” Udom said.
Indonesian doctors also agree that Sinovac may not be the best vaccine on the market, but say so far that’s all they have, and it’s better than nothing.
“So far, because we can’t produce (a vaccine), we don’t have (another) option,” said Eka Julianta Wahjoepramono, Dean of Medicine at Pelita Harapan University.
“Sinovac is the only choice,” said Eka, who was fully vaccinated with Sinovac but contracted a severe case of COVID-19 last month.
Sinovac did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters.
‘TEMPORAL RAIN’ OR ALWAYS DOUBT
Doubts over the effectiveness of Chinese vaccines threaten to undermine China’s so-called “vaccine diplomacy”, through which Beijing has sought to increase its diplomatic influence in the world. China has shipped hundreds of millions of doses of locally developed COVID-19 vaccines overseas.
Singapore said this week that people who received Sinovac injections are excluded from its total immunization count due to a lack of data on the vaccine’s effectiveness, especially against the contagious Delta variant.
“We do not really have a medical or scientific basis or the data necessary to establish the effectiveness of Sinovac in terms of infection and serious illnesses on Delta,” said Minister of Health Ong Ye Kung.
China reiterated that its vaccines are safe and effective.
“Chinese vaccines have gained a good reputation in the international community with their widely recognized safety and efficacy,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said on Monday in response to a question on whether to other countries have expressed concerns about Chinese vaccines.
“To date, more than 100 countries have approved Chinese vaccines … The first batch of vaccines to arrive in many developing countries is from China. They call the Chinese doses ‘timely rain.’
(Reporting by Chayut Setboonsarng and Panarat Thepgumpanat in Bangkok; Additional reporting by Karen Lema in Manila, Jonathan Spicer in Istanbul, Stanley Widanto and Agustinus Beo Da Costa in Jakarta and Kate Lamb in Sydney, Aradhana Aravindan in Singapore and Ryan Woo in Beijing; Editing by Miyoung Kim and Kim Coghill)
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