IN what appears to be an earnest effort to shoot down allegations of favoring pharmaceutical companies from China and Russia, a top government official assured the public that China’s Sinovac and Russia’s Sputnik V of Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology will soon be conducting clinical trials in the Philippines.
In a media forum, vaccine czar Secretary Carlito Galvez Jr. said that these pharmaceutical companies have agreed to commence clinical trials in the Philippines this month – or the latest in the first week of January next year.
“The Sinovac and also the Gamaleya will undergo clinical trials here this coming either December or first week of January,” Galvez said.
In October, the Vaccine Expert Panel (VEP), under the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), cleared China’s anti-COVID-19 vaccine Sinovac for clinical trials in the Philippines.
Gamaleya, meanwhile, recently said that Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine is 95% effective according to a second interim analysis of clinical trial data.
During the forum, Galvez said he was told that Sinovac is among the safest vaccines for COVID-19, given that there has been no “life-threatening” incident reported in connection to using it.
“The vaccine experts have briefed me about the [safety] and efficacy of the vaccine. They said one of the safest vaccines is basically from China because it came from the classical vaccine platform,” Galvez said.
“There is no reported adverse and life-threatening incident with this kind of vaccine,” he added.
For his part, presidential adviser for entrepreneurship Joey Concepcion said Sinovac has been a reliable vaccine, noting that it is already being used in China.
“Definitely in the Sinovac, the Filipino and Chinese Chamber is supporting Secretary Galvez. We have heard and seen that Sinovac is a reliable vaccine and actually they have been using it already in China…” Concepcion said in the same briefing.
“I believe that the Chinese vaccine is similar to AstraZeneca in the case that it is using all technology and the second thing is it’s also the same level of temperature, two to eight degrees as AstraZeneca…” he added.
Galvez said based on their initial organization with the Chinese pharmacy, if ever the Philippines will close the deal this December, it would take them 60 to 90 days to prepare and ship the vaccine.
“Meaning, we can foresee that there is a greater, better scenario that we can get the vaccine in the first quarter, maybe March or late February,” he said.
Galvez said the government is negotiating to get 20 million to 50 million Sinovac vaccines.