More Information Needed From Sinovac: Experts

An expert panel tasked with advising the government on the use of coronavirus vaccines in Hong Kong said on Wednesday that it is seeking more information from mainland drug maker Sinovac about the jabs it produced.

Speaking after a three-hour meeting, the panel’s convenor, Professor Wallace Lau, said the panel considers the safety and efficacy of the vaccine “acceptable” after studying data from late-stage clinical trials of the jabs in Brazil, Turkey and Indonesia.

However, the experts said they would like to get more information about the vaccines, including the difference in the level of antibodies produced when the jabs are given 14 and 28 days apart.

He said the panel will wait for additional data from Sinovac and decide whether to recommend the vaccine to be used in Hong Kong at the next meeting two weeks later.

“The decision that I have just announced has been arrived at by the whole panel, all 12 members agreed on the approach that I have just highlighted," Lau said.

“They actually submitted quite complete data. But we do want to clarify a couple of things with them.”

Lau also played down concerns over the government’s decision to exempt Sinovac from having to publish data from late-stage clinical trials in a medical journal.

“I hope the public will not only consider whether the data has been published in a medical journal. I hope they have confidence in the 12 members of our expert panel. They are of high academic standard,” he said.

“We just spent three hours looking at the data. This is because we adopted the same way of scrutinising a report to be published in a medical journal.”