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Is western scepticism of Russian & Chinese vaccines fair? + 5 reasons not to panic

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Is western scepticism of the Russian and Chinese vaccines fair? (immunization style)
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/scien...ls-sinovac

EXCERPTS: . . . Merely to ask the question invites accusations of western bias. Why shouldn’t those other vaccines be every bit as good as those made by the likes of Moderna, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca? After all, China is now at the cutting edge of scientific innovation, not least in the life sciences. But the fact is that reliable data on the testing and efficacy of the Chinese and Russian vaccines has been hard to come by.

Confidence in the Russian Sputnik V vaccine [...] was hardly helped by President Putin’s announcement in August 2020 that it had been approved for emergency use before the results of the Phase 1 and 2 trials had been published, or the crucial, large-scale Phase 3 trials even begun. ... Despite these initial misgivings, the Phase 3 results, published in the Lancet in February, look good...

[...] The Chinese vaccine now approved by the WHO is made by the Beijing-based company Sinopharm. ... Between them more than 360m doses have already been distributed, around half of which have been in countries outside China. ... Here again, reception of the vaccines hasn’t been helped by a general distrust of official announcements. The lack of transparency in China as the pandemic began in Wuhan slowed the ability of the rest of the world to respond ... Several other Chinese vaccines are also being rolled out in China and other countries. They may well become a vital part of the global arsenal against Covid.

There are lessons for all parties, if they choose to heed them. While scientists outside Russia and China were right to call for more transparency and better data, there seems to be little ground for knee-jerk prejudice about the quality of the vaccine work in those countries (a product, perhaps, of the romantic delusion among many scientists that good science can only be done in democracies).

But their leaders can hardly expect assertive nationalistic claims to be accepted on trust, not least while they indulge in them so immoderately—while suppressing the information needed to assess them—in other geopolitical spheres. Not even their own populations seem ready to buy the official line: surveys in both Russia and China have shown that fewer than half of the respective populations are willing to take the homegrown jabs, in part because of lack of transparency and distrust at the speed with which they were developed. Here, as elsewhere, the pandemic is political... (MORE - details)


5 reasons why no need to panic about coronavirus variants ("be tranquil" fashions)
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/05...-variants/

EXCERPTS: . . . Here are five reasons why we can be cautiously optimistic.

1. Vaccines work, even against troublesome variants [...]

2. The immune response is robust [...]

3. When vaccinated people do get infected, the shots protect against the worst outcomes [...]

4. The same mutations keep popping up [...]

5. If the effectiveness of the vaccines begins to wane, we can make booster shots [...]

Eventually, the current vaccines will become less effective. “That’s to be expected,” Chandran says. But he expects that to happen gradually: “There will be time for next-generation vaccines.”

[...] But while we don’t need to panic, now is also not the time for complacency. Just because the current crop of variants seems to be relatively tame doesn’t mean every new variant will be. “The odds are that we’re going to see a lot more of the same kinds of thing that we’ve already seen,” Chandran says. But “very rare things can happen and do happen,” he adds. “And if those rare things confer a tremendous improvement in success, they may only need to happen a couple of times.”

The surge in India is especially concerning. “That’s giving the virus a lot of chances to pull the evolutionary slot-machine handle and maybe come up with a jackpot,” Friedrich says. And while vaccine rollout has been going well in many rich countries, poorer countries may not have widespread access to vaccines until 2022 or even later. “We have these amazing vaccines,” Chandran says. “We need to figure out a way to get them to everybody.” (MORE - missing details)
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