Washington Post: “Enquanto a China se aproxima de uma vacina contra o coronavírus, nuvem de suborno paira sobre a farmacêutica Sinovac”.
O governador de SP deve estar furioso nesse momento. Artigo do Washington Post sobre corrupção da Sinovac aparece nome e foto do Dória (sem acusá-lo de estar envolvido em algum esquema).
O foco do artigo não é a eficácia da vacina, mas o pagamento de suborno para aprovação dos produtos e ceticismo da classe médica com a “flexibilidade moral” da empresa.
Chinese coronavirus-vaccine maker Sinovac Biotech is good at getting its products to market. It was first to begin clinical trials of a SARS vaccine in 2003 and first to bring a swine flu vaccine to consumers in 2009.
Its CEO was also bribing China’s drug regulator for vaccine approvals during that time, court records show.
Sinovac is now seeking to supply its coronavirus vaccine to developing nations, from Brazil to Turkey to Indonesia. While graft and weak transparency have long plagued China’s pharmaceutical industry, seldom has the reliability of a single drug vendor from the country mattered this much to the rest of the world.
Sinovac is one of China’s
two coronavirus-vaccine front-runners, with its clinical testing in the same final stage as Moderna’s and Pfizer-BioNTech’s. Domestically, Sinovac’s vaccine is in second place, with state-owned Sinopharm’s vaccines more widely administered under an emergency-use program. Another Chinese vaccine, developed by CanSino and a military research institute, is approved for emergency use by China’s military.
China’s Sinovac reports mixed findings in early coronavirus vaccine trials
Sinovac’s vaccine, Coronavac, may end up adopted in a number of developing markets. Officials in Brazil and Indonesia — the most populous nations in Latin America and Southeast Asia — say Coronavac could be approved in coming weeks. In Brazil, São Paulo Gov. João Doria has called it the safest vaccine the country has tested.
Sinovac has not yet released efficacy data, making it unclear whether its vaccine can protect recipients as successfully as the vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer, which were more than 90 percent effective in preliminary analyses.
Sinovac has acknowledged the bribery case involving its CEO, saying in regulatory filings that he cooperated with prosecutors and was not charged. The CEO said in testimony he could not refuse demands for money from a regulatory official.AD
Sinovac has not been involved in safety scandals, and there is no evidence that any of the vaccines approved in cases involving bribery were faulty. But some medical experts say that extra scrutiny of Sinovac’s drug claims is justified, given its record of moral flexibility.
“The fact that the company has a history of bribery casts a long shadow of doubt over its unpublished, non-peer-reviewed data claims about its vaccine,” said Arthur Caplan, medical ethics division director at New York University Langone Medical Center. “Even in a plague, a company with a morally dubious track record has to be treated with great caution concerning its claims.
