Hundreds of thousands of people in China have been given COVID-19 vaccines, before final regulatory approval for general use. It's an unusual move that raises ethical and safety questions
Chinese companies earlier drew attention for giving the vaccine to their top executives and leading researchers before human trials to test their safety and efficacy had even begun. In recent months, they have injected a far larger number under an emergency use designation approved in June, and that number appears poised to rise.A Chinese health official said on Friday that China, which has largely eradicated the disease, needs to take steps to prevent it from coming back.
"The first people to have priority in emergency use are the vaccine researchers and the vaccine manufacturers because when the pandemic comes, if these people are infected then there’s no way to produce the vaccine," Yin said. The Chinese government referenced the World Health Organization's emergency-use principles to create its own through a strict process, National Health Commission official Zheng Zhongwei said at a news conference on Friday. He said there have been no serious side effects in the clinical trials.
But Diego Silva, a lecturer in Bioethics at the University of Sydney, said that giving vaccines to hundreds of thousands outside of clinical trials doesn’t have "scientific merit" in China, where there are currently very few locally transmitted cases, and incoming arrivals are quarantined centrally. "I’m willing to be a little white mouse, and the biggest reason is because I have trust in our country’s vaccination technology," he said.
While emergency use may be the right path, Chinese companies are not being transparent about issues such as informed consent, said Joy Zhang, a professor who researches the ethical governance of emerging science at University of Kent in the UK.
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