(Reuters) – China’s Sinovac Biotech said on Friday that data in the late stages of the COVID-19 vaccine from Brazil and Turkey showed that it prevented hospitalization and death in COVID-19 patients, but that it have lower efficacy rate to block infections.
In the trial of 12,396 people, the CoronaVac vaccine was found to be 100% effective in preventing COVID-19 sufferers from being hospitalized or dying, and 83.7% effective in avoiding cases requiring any medical treatment. , but only 50.65% are effective at infecting people, according to a statement.
The trials evaluated the efficacy of the two-shot vaccine candidate 14 days after vaccination of the participants, including health workers treating COVID-19 patients.
In Turkey, the vaccine was tested in two phases among health workers and the general population and was found to have an efficacy rate of 91.25% to prevent COVID-19, based on an analysis of 29 cases.
In early January this year, Brazilian researchers reported interim results of the CoronaVac vaccine test, which showed that it was 50.4% effective in preventing symptomatic infections.
The efficacy rates of other vaccines differed widely by country, an emerging pattern reflecting the impact of new variants.
Among the coronavirus variants currently most important to public health scientists and experts are British, South African and Brazilian, which appear to be spreading faster than others.
By comparison, the two currently authorized COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer Inc and partner BioNTech SE and Moderna Inc appear to be approximately 95% effective in preventing disease in their crucial late-stage trials. These studies were conducted in the United States before broad reports on variants appeared.
Brazil’s national vaccination program is currently dependent on CoronaVac and the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca Plc. Both have been approved for emergency use.
(Reported by Vishwadha Chander, edited by Peter Henderson and Sonya Hepinstall)