A Chinese pharmaceutical company working on a coronavirus vaccine has begun speaking with multiple countries about getting first approval, despite not having completed wide-scale safety and effectiveness trials, The Wall Street Journal reports.
CanSino Biologics Inc. developed its vaccine, which has already been approved for emergency use in China, with the country’s military, and hopes to make it the first vaccine available for public use internationally, apart from clinical trials.
“It helps to build the safety database and certainly build the confidence in the fact that the vaccine is safe,” said Pierre Morgon, CanSino senior vice president for international business. “If, in the meantime, if it is demonstrated as being effective in the Phase 3 trials, then it might be an accelerator for future contracts for vaccine supply.”
The Journal notes that trial results published in the Lancet show that the vaccine promotes an immune response, and that no serious safety concerns were found.
Although Morgon would not specify every country that the company has been in talks with, he did note that talks are going on with Pakistan and some Latin American countries, but none have approved the vaccine for emergency use so far.
Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown University, warned that vaccines are never distributed to the public before they complete large-scale safety and effectiveness trials, because oftentimes medications that succeed in early testing fail once they reach the final trials.
Gostin said that releasing the vaccine without completing wide-scale trials is “breaking all the global conventions around science and ethics. It’s a huge gamble.”
He added, “You might end up rolling out a vaccine that causes enormous hazards in the population or is ineffective. If it’s ineffective, then the public is going to assume they’re immune and go about their business and spread Covid[-19] like mad.”
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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