Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: That the Chinese do not follow any morals or ethics, value human life or respect human rights, routinely torture minorities, support terrorism, and force their own soldiers to wage war without proper training or weapons was well-known for long. What was not known so far was that the Chinese could even forcibly inject hundreds of thousands of people to test if experimental vaccines could cure Covid-19.
This has actually happened: China has used its own citizens as guinea pigs.
Not only this, but China is also using its potential vaccines as weapons to penetrate South America and the non-Arab Muslim world.
According to media reports, a Chinese pharmaceutical company has injected hundreds of thousands of people with experimental Covid-19 vaccines, even as western experts have warned against mass vaccinations before rigorous scientific studies were completed as per international norms.
China National Biotec Group Co., a subsidiary of state-owned Sinopharm, has administered two experimental vaccine candidates to hundreds of thousands of people under an “emergency-use” condition approved by Beijing in July 2020.
This is not the only company to do so.
Another Chinese vaccine maker, Sinovac Biotech, said 90 percent of its employees—nearly 3,000 workers—and their families have been injected with the company’s leading Covid-19 vaccine, despite the fact that it has not completed late-stage trials.
These and some other Chinese firms are currently part of the global race for a Covid-19 vaccine. But none of the non-Chinese companies has stooped so low to forcibly inject its own employees and their families.
Dr. Yin Weidong, CEO of Sinovac, showcased his company’s vaccine candidate to the public for the first time at a trade show in Beijing recently, saying that he and his employees had been injected with the vaccine as a safety protocol. “As a vaccine developer and manufacturer, a new outbreak could directly impact our vaccine production,” he added.
He disclosed that the distribution of the vaccine to Sinovac workers and their families occurred under China’s emergency-use vaccine program, a government policy that allows specific populations of people to receive unproven inoculations.
In June, another vaccine maker, CanSino, declared that its vaccine candidate had been approved for use in the Chinese armed forces. State-run Chinese media said that a vaccine developed by Sinopharm, a state-owned vaccine maker, was being distributed to frontline medical workers.
The Chinese government, however, confirmed the existence of the emergency program only in August when Zheng Zhongwei, head of the country’s coronavirus vaccine task force, said the government had started approving unnamed vaccine candidates for emergency use in late July.
The emergency program planned to vaccinate high-risk groups like medical workers, pandemic response officials, and border inspection, agents. China was considering expanding it to cover workers at produce markets, transport industry officials, and service workers, he said.
Sinovac’s candidate, named CoronaVac, has already begun large-scale, Phase III human trials in Brazil and Indonesia and had received approval to begin trials in Turkey and Bangladesh.
The company plans to manufacture 300 million doses annually. Each patient will require two doses. It recently signed an agreement with Indonesia to supply 40 million doses by March 2021.
Many in the pharmaceutical world have, however, disapproved of such Chinese tactics to use diseases and medicines as part of its expansionist plans. They have also questioned China’s ethics deploying vaccine candidates before the conclusion of Phase III trials on tens of thousands of human ‘volunteers’.
Ray Yip, former head of the Gates Foundation in China, condemned it as “very wrong”
China’s emergency-use vaccine program is taking place at a time the U.S. is debating whether to introduce a similar policy in America as well. Recently, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control asked the states to prepare for the distribution of a potential vaccine by November, indicating the possibility of a vaccine getting early, emergency clearance from the government.
But some U.S. officials have cautioned that no vaccine should be given even to select groups until it completes clinical trials and is proven safe and effective.
“The one thing that you would not want to see with a vaccine is getting a EUA (emergency-use authorization) before you have a signal of efficacy,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in August.
Beyond not being safe, he said that rolling out a vaccine under emergency guidelines would undermine the U.S.’s other efforts to produce a vaccine. “If you prematurely let a vaccine out…it would make it difficult, if not impossible, for the other vaccines to enroll people in their trial,” he was quoted as saying.
