Thread by @WilliamYang120

"#China’s lack of an mRNA shot — and its delay in approving a viable foreign option — has poked holes in #Beijing’s victorious pandemic narrative and prompted experts to question whether the country’s go-it-alone approach is ...nytimes.com/2022/02/18/bus…

... less triumphant than officials would have the world believe."

"#China is so committed to competing with the United States and the West on science and technology that some in the scientific community say it is hard to imagine that the state hasn’t pulled out all the stops to develop a homegrown mRNA vaccine."

“We don’t know how decisions are made nowadays in China, but a better vaccine would definitely help in maintaining a zero-Covid policy,” said Jin Dongyan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong who has urged his peers in mainland China to approve the BioNTech vaccine.

“They are presenting to the world that they are doing well in vaccine development,” he said of officials in Beijing. “And it would be embarrassing for them to show the opposite to the Chinese people.”

In recent months, officials have begun openly discussing the need to introduce better vaccine technology. “We should learn about the good things in other countries, such as mRNA vaccines,” Zhong Nanshan, China’s top respiratory scientist, said at a conference in December.

"China last week approved for emergency use a Covid-19 pill made by Pfizer called Paxlovid, a move that some experts said could help change Beijing’s pandemic strategy."

"It wasn’t that long ago that China appeared ready to introduce an mRNA vaccine for Covid-19. Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical, BioNTech’s Chinese partner, told investors last year that regulators would approve its mRNA vaccine for use in China by July 2021."

"That optimism has since faded. Chinese authorities now say they are still reviewing documents in order to “make a final decision on the approval of our vaccine,” a spokeswoman for BioNTech said."

"As approval for BioNTech languished, China said that it was close to producing a homegrown mRNA shot called ARCoVax. Two private drugmakers and China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences said...

... they were preparing to make 200 million doses by October, a Communist Party newspaper reported in September."

"If China is pursing a program similar to Operation Warp Speed, it has not said anything about it publicly. One of the private companies helping to develop ARCoVax is Suzhou Abogen, a start-up founded in 2019 by a scientist who used to work at Moderna.

Before the pandemic, Abogen was developing mRNA drugs for cancer, one of China’s biggest epidemics."

"The other drugmaker, Walvax, is a publicly listed pharmaceutical group. The two companies’ partnership with the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences suggests strong government backing, though Beijing has not mentioned an official collaboration."

"One recent study showed that two doses of Sinovac boosted with an mRNA shot offered strong antibody protection against both the Delta and Omicron variants. But it is still unclear when the ARCoVax vaccine will be available in China."

“It’s very difficult to predict actually when we will get approval,” said Sean Marett, chief business and commercial officer of BioNTech, at a health care conference last month. “But China remains for us an extremely important market,” he added. “We’re very, very committed to it.