Sinopharm needs clinical trial results to decide if its COVID-19 vaccine needs booster shot, according to a company executive.
A company executive on Sunday said that Sinopharm will need to assess results from overseas Phase III human clinical trials in order to decide whether its COVID-19 vaccine should be followed by a booster shot.
In a report on Inquirer, vaccine developers and regulators were looking at whether booster shots were necessary amidst concerns that emerging COVID-19 variants might weaken protection of COVID-19 vaccines designed against older strains of coronavirus disease.
Zhang Yuntao, vice president at China National Biotec Group (CNBG), on Sunday said at a news conference that the preliminary results so far showed that the booster shot can effectively increase the neutralizing antibody titer and antibody persistence, adding that the booster shot can also effectively improve the COVID-19 vaccine’s ability to resist coronavirus mutations.
“Is a booster shot needed? When will the booster be given? The answer should be based on the results of future phase III clinical studies,” Zhang said.
Citing results from laboratory tests using blood samples taken from clinical trial participants, Zhang told a news conference that antibodies triggered by two COVID-19 vaccine products from Sinopharm both have “pretty good neutralizing effect” on variants found in South Africa and Britain as well as a few others.
Laboratory testing, according to Zhang, was ongoing for variants found in Zimbabwe and Brazil.
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Gao Qiang, the general manager at Sinovac unit Sinovac Life Sciences, said during the same presser that the effect of antibodies induced by Sinovac’s CoronaVac COVID-19 vaccine declined against a COVID-19 variant identified in South Africa, while the effect against a COVID-19 variant found in the United Kingdom remained similar to that against the older Wuhan COVID-19 variant.
Sinovac, according to Gao, was importing the COVID-19 variant from Brazil for COVID-19 vaccine research and development, and work tailored to the South Africa COVID-19 variant had already begun.
A Sinovac spokesperson said that the correlation between antibody levels and the COVID-19 vaccine’s efficacy wasn’t immediately clear.
On Tuesday, Sinovac said that the company was testing a booster shot in a China-based clinical trial, with participants given a 3rd COVID-19 vaccine dose around 8 months after receiving the 2nd dose.
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