China Will Provide Vaccines for Tokyo, Beijing Olympics Athletes

The Chinese Olympic Committee will provide Chinese coronavirus vaccines to athletes participating in the postponed Tokyo 2020 Summer Games, slated for July, and the Beijing 2022 Winter Games.

“International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach said on March 11 that the Chinese Olympic Committee will provide additional vaccines to participants of both Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games and Beijing Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games,” People’s Daily, an official Chinese Communist Party newspaper, reported Thursday.

Bach expressed gratitude to China for the offer, according to the newspaper, describing it as “in the true Olympic spirit of solidarity.” He added that the IOC “will pay for these additional doses” of coronavirus vaccines.

China on Monday approved another, domestically-made coronavirus vaccine candidate for emergency use in the country without releasing clinical data to demonstrate the shot’s safety or efficacy rate against the Chinese coronavirus.

Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control, “led the development of a protein subunit vaccine that was approved by regulators last week for emergency use,” the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Microbiology said in a statement released March 15.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences joined forces with China’s Anhui Zhifei Longcom Biopharmaceutical company to develop the new vaccine candidate.

“The team finished phase 1 and phase 2 clinical trials in October and is currently conducting the last phase of trials in Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia,” according to the press release.

“There is no publicly available information in peer-reviewed scientific journals about the clinical trial data showing efficacy or safety” for the shot, the Associated Press noted of the vaccine candidate Monday.

The shot’s efficacy data cannot be shared publicly at this time, a spokesperson for Anhui Zhifei Longcom said on March 15. He added that the Chinese biopharmaceutical company has been providing information about the vaccine candidate to relevant health authorities as it becomes available.

The efficacy rate for CoronaVac — another Chinese-made coronavirus vaccine candidate recently approved for emergency use in China — is 50.38 percent, according to late-stage clinical data released in January. CoronaVac is currently not approved for use in people aged 60 and over in China due to safety concerns. Hong Kong government officials waived health requirements in the city to approve CoronaVac’s use among senior citizens earlier this year. Weeks afterward, three people died and at least two people were admitted to intensive care units in Hong Kong after receiving doses of CoronaVac through a Hong Kong government program in March.