Expatriates in China will soon be offered the BioNTech/Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, but only if they are not Chinese. Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced the deal today during a visit to China accompanied by a group of business leaders from his country. , including BioNTech boss Uğur Şahin.
Scholz has agreed with Chinese President Xi Jinping and outgoing Prime Minister Li Keqiang that the countries will work more closely together to fight the corona virus, he said. "This includes a approval of the BioNTech vaccine for expatriates in China," he said during a news conference in Beijing. The chancellor did not say whether he meant only German emigrants or all emigrants in the country.
But an influential financial news outlet, Caixin, reported that the BioNTech vaccine would only be available to "German expats" in China. But going forward, Scholz made it clear that he hoped this would be a "first step" towards wider use of the vaccine by granting blanket approval for vaccination in China.
Closer collaboration with the EU Medicines Agency [the European Medicines Agency] would pave the way here," he added, noting that BioNTech's regulatory filing is still pending. BioNTech applied for a Chinese license for its COVID-19 vaccine last year. A company spokesman declined to comment on the process.
Nevertheless, Friday's announcement is an important first step for China, which has so far relied heavily on domestically-made vaccines, particularly those from Sinopharm and CanSino, in its fight against the coronavirus. These vaccines, which use older virus-based technologies, have been outperformed in numerous studies by newer mRNA vaccines from BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna.
While several companies in China are also developing mRNA vaccines for COVID, none have been approved yet.
Meanwhile, a partnership between Chinese company Fosun and BioNTech, formed at the start of the pandemic, has also failed to deliver the German company's vaccine to the eastern market. Scholz touted BioNTech's vaccine developed with Pfizer as "one of the most effective vaccines to fight the pandemic" and allowed the government to ease public health restrictions.
China has adopted a zero-COVID policy and implemented strict lockdown measures to prevent transmission of the coronavirus. Scholz admitted that China's means of combating the pandemic are "very different" from those of Germany, but are on the same page in the fight against the pathogen.
And while vaccine nationalism has become a feature of the pandemic, the same cannot be said for treatments: China approved Pfizer's COVID-19 antiviral pill Paxlovid under conditional marketing approval in February this year.
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