BEIJING: China has offered to administer homegrown inactivated vaccine shots, which reportedly showed potent protection against COVID-19, to the employees of state-owned enterprises travelling to high-risk areas abroad to work on projects, official media here reported.
The vaccination offer serves not only to protect Chinese overseas from infection but also to help provide more valuable data to help detect antibody levels and calculate vaccine protection rates for a global reference to the vaccine's efficacy, state-run Global Times reported.
The Chinese employees of SOEs preparing to go abroad are offered to administer two choices of home-grown inactivated vaccine shots for urgent use, with both shots having demonstrated safety in human trials, state-run Global Times reported.
Inactivated vaccines use the killed version of the germ that causes a disease.
The two vaccines for urgent use are developed by Beijing Biological Products Institute and Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, both affiliated to China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm), it said.
Both are inactivated vaccines that have shown safe results with no distinct adverse reaction during the first two phases of clinical trials, the report said.
"According to the feedback given by Sinopharm, the two vaccines have been verified to be safe through clinical trials and are now going to the phase III clinical trial," it quoted an official notice as saying.
"All procedures are undergoing with relevant national laws and regulations," it said.
"The vaccination is completely voluntary. Informed consent must be signed prior to vaccination and the second dose should be administered within 14-28 days after the completion of the first dose," the notice said.
"In special emergency situations, a one-time two-dose regimen is also accepted though the durable antibody response is relatively weak, as indicated by the available data.
" The resumption of production of overseas projects and the health of overseas workers are still under serious threat.
For better prevention and quicker recovery of Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects, Sinopharm has given priority to supporting workers intending to go overseas to vaccinate for urgent needs, the notice said.
On June 9, state-run Xinhua news agency reported that China's inactivated COVID-19 vaccine has shown potent protection against SARS-CoV-2, which causes the disease, in animal experiments.
Research on the vaccine candidate BBIBP-CorV was jointly conducted by the Beijing Institute of Biological Products under China National Biotec Group, the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences as well as other institutions.