How effective is Sinovac vaccine? Here are some lessons from other countries

NGAPORE: While her peers were choosing between the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, 32-year-old Jade Lim made an uncommon choice.

Despite having no known allergies to the two vaccines, she went with the Sinovac-CoronaVac vaccine, available at approved private healthcare institutions within the Special Access Route framework.

“Everyone was shocked,” she said, as she recalled how her friends and family reacted.

But she felt more comfortable with Sinovac — an inactivated virus vaccine — compared with the other two, which use messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology. For one thing, she was concerned about the side effects of the mRNA vaccines.

“As a healthy person with a good immune system, I feel that it wasn’t necessary to take something that would trigger so much reaction in the body,” said the vet.

“Also … what’ll happen 50 years later (is something) we wouldn’t know, whereas inactivated virus (vaccines) have been used for decades.”

  They are also not covered by the Vaccine Injury Financial Assistance Programme, which gives a one-time payout for anyone suffering adverse reactions to the mRNA vaccines in the national vaccination programme.

Despite this, there have been queues for the Sinovac vaccine.

Infectious diseases specialist Loh Jiashen from Farrer Park Hospital noted that “it’s not exactly true”, however, that Sinovac is safer than the mRNA vaccines, which have been used in “millions of doses” round the world.

“The amount of (mRNA) data that’s come back has been rigorous, robust, and the whole data has been examined under the microscope,” he said. “The Sinovac safety data isn’t as open and not as publicly available.”