Moderna may be coming to city

Hong Kong may get Moderna’s Omicron vaccine in the third quarter of this year, Society of Hospital Pharmacists president William Chui Chun-ming said.

However, he acknowledged that there were still some procedures to go through.

“Moderna has not yet reached an agreement with the [SAR] government as relevant data is needed,” he said. As vaccine data is not publicly published, it is believed that Moderna would follow up on the needed data with the Hong Kong government.

The pharmaceutical company said on Monday that it offered to provide Hong Kong with at least eight million doses of its second-generation Covid vaccine, which targets both the Omicron variant and the original Covid-19 strain.

It was understood that discussions with the Hong Kong government had entered the advanced stage.

But Chui added that it remains unclear which supplier the government would turn to as Moderna only manufactures vaccines targeting both strains, while Pfizer and BioNTech also make vaccines that solely target the Omicron variant.

He said the all nations are waiting for the World Health Organization to decide which vaccine to use.

Chui said that the government would procure the eight million doses in several batches, and added that “it is likely that the government would purchase both mRNA vaccines and mainland-made inactivated vaccines.”

Speaking on a radio program yesterday, Chui said people who had been double- or triple-jabbed can take one more Moderna jab, while people who have not been vaccinated should get three jabs.

“One should take at least three jabs as many studies had proved that two jabs of vaccines are insufficient to protect people from the Omicron variant,” he said.

Meanwhile, the University of Hong Kong and Sinopharm have jabbed over 500 volunteers for their new Omicron vaccine and no severe side effect has occurred.

The vaccine will be manufactured by Sinopharm’s factories in Beijing and Wuhan.

The researchers expected preliminary data analysis to be available in October, after which the team would apply for approval for the vaccine to enter the market, hopefully within the year, they said.

The team had planned to recruit 1,800 volunteers who had been double or triple jabbed.

Among the 500 who had been inoculated, a few only reported pains around the needle port or muscle ache.

The team will soon measure the volunteers’ antibody levels.

Team leader Ivan Hung Fan-ngai said: “If the antibody levels of the vaccinated are roughly equal to those of people who had recovered from Covid for a month, it proves that the effect of the vaccine is good.”

He added that the vaccine would be effective against all Omicron sub-variants despite the vaccine being targeted at the BA.1 sub-variant.

 

 

[文章及圖片轉載The Standard 29/06/2022 連結]