Regulations On Emergency Vaccine Use Now In Force

Regulations have come into force that will allow the emergency use of vaccines against Covid-19, as the government readies a universal inoculation programme to stem the pandemic. They were gazetted late on Wednesday not long after the government said it had procured enough vaccines to cover the entire population.

The mainland's Sinovac Biotech vaccine should be the first to arrive in the SAR, probably next month. It is expected to be followed by the US-German vaccine by Pfizer-BioNTech, which is to be distributed by the mainland's Fosun, and the University of Oxford vaccine by Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical giant, Astrazeneca.

All of the vaccines have been rushed to market, drawing safety concerns in some quarters. But the Chief Executive Carrie Lam said more data is emerging, and people should look at facts, rather than country of origin.

The Sinovac vaccine uses the traditional inactivated virus method that spurs the body to produce antibodies to fight the disease.

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine takes another approach, it tricks the body into making antibodies by using the disease's genetic code, known as messenger ribonucleic acid or mRNA.

The Oxford vaccine is different again. It has been produced from a chimpanzee common cold virus that has been rendered harmless but with genetic information from Covid-19 added into it to bring about antibody production.