Timeline of China’s COVID Vaccine Development Raises Serious Concerns
Cheng Xiaonong, Contributor
July 5, 2021
Commentary
Ever since the CCP virus began spreading in China around the fall of 2019, its vaccine development was once ahead of the rest of the world. However, as one analyzes the timeline of the R&D process of Chinese-made vaccines, a series of anomalies occur, prompting the international community to question the origin of COVID-19. Moreover, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) vaccine production plan reveals the regime’s attempt of profiting from the pandemic.
The Starting Date of China’s Vaccine R&D
According to official data, the first case of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus, was identified on Dec. 1, 2019; and by Jan. 21, 2020, only 440 people were confirmed to have contracted the virus. On Jan. 15, 2020, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission’s 8th public health report stated that “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission has been found so far.” If this information was accurate, then it appears the regime did not expect the virus to spread globally and weren’t prepared for such an event.
However, on March 25 this year, an article in the state-run media Beijing Daily blew the narrative in the opposite direction. This report mentioned that the CCP had formulated five R&D strategies for vaccine developments in early 2020 and began to roll out various prototypes; and one of these five vaccine technologies came from Major General Chen Wei, the chief expert of the CCP’s military biochemical weapons, and her team. This news is both suspicious and thought-provoking.
According to Chinese state media, immediately after scientists in Hubei Province isolated suitable virus strains on Jan. 9, 2020, local authorities created a joint team between Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and Wuhan Institute of Biological Products to develop vaccines against the CCP virus.
Among all the vaccine R&D teams involved, specific starting dates were publicized for two companies: Sinopharm’s vaccine R&D was officially approved and started on Jan. 19, 2020, and Tianjin-based CanSino Biologics’ COVID-19 vaccine project was approved and started on Jan. 20, 2020.
Three questions can be discerned from this.
First, if the initial virus sequence really evolved from natural origins (for example, all the harm is to be blamed on a few bats) as the CCP said, and it is not transmissible between people, then why did the CCP mobilize all available forces, including its military biological warfare units for the large-scale research and development of vaccines?
Second, the CCP set off the research and development of multiple vaccines before the Wuhan lockdown on Jan. 23, 2020, indicating that it was very clear to the CCP that the virus would spread on a global scale. That being the case, why would they fabricate lies on how the virus is not easily contagious? Such nonsense will only let the virus spread even faster across the world.
Third, at the beginning of 2020, all types of vaccines at that time have entered the application-oriented stage (not all were commercialized). Why wasn’t Wuhan locked down then? Wouldn’t the number of infections and deaths be minimized this way? People with common sense can deduce that the CCP’s actions in the early stages of the pandemic were questionable, which exposed that the regime was not trying to contain the virus and prevent it from spreading around the world.
Were Chinese Vaccines Already Prepared Before Pandemic?
Prashant Yadav, a healthcare supply chain expert at the Center for Global Development, an international think tank, pointed out that “vaccine manufacturing is an endeavor where an almost infinite combination of things have to work perfectly.”
“There’s variability in the raw materials, the microorganisms needed to grow vaccine products, the conditions of the culture in which those microorganisms are grown, and more,” Yadav told USA today.
Therefore, it usually takes several years to design a vaccine prototype and then develop new vaccines. However, China seemed to be very familiar with the development of this vaccine.
It is common knowledge that vaccine prototypes used in clinical trials must first be developed over a lengthy time. The Pfizer vaccine began research and development on March 20, 2020 and it took them at least four months to produce a feasible prototype; Chinese state media reported the Sinopharm vaccine began its R&D on Jan. 19, 2020, and started clinical trials on April 12 in the same year.
Sinopharm was faster at creating a vaccine than Pfizer, which implies that the CCP was prepared for a pandemic before it all began, including getting a head start on the vaccine.
How China Swiftly Mass Produced COVID Vaccines
There are currently at least seven vaccine producers in the world, including Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, J&J/Janssen, Sinopharm, Sinovac, and Covishield. When the American vaccines were launched at the end of 2020, the production capacity of the Pfizer vaccine was quite small at that time; only until today has their manufacturing rate reached 100 million doses per month. However, Chinese vaccines have been made at a pace preceding Pfizer’s by almost one year.
The Pfizer vaccine in the United States began research and development in late March last year; they then moved forward with prototypes, the three phases of clinical trials until the final approval and market launch. This process took them about nine months. The Pfizer team itself couldn’t even believe how fast this happened. It took the company another few months to get the production speed up to 100 million doses a month. So, it took Pfizer about a year from initiating their vaccine program to the full scale market launch.
China joined the World Health Organization’s “COVAX” in early October 2020, providing vaccines and funding for the purchase of vaccines for 92 low- and middle-income countries. When China joined the plan, Zheng Zhongwei, head of the vaccine R&D team of the Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism of the CCP State Council, said that by the end of 2020, China’s annual vaccine production capacity could reach 610 million doses. In other words, as early as the end of summer and early autumn of 2020, the production capacity of Chinese vaccines would be close to the monthly output of hundreds of millions of doses. This is why in the first few months of this year, only the Chinese vaccines dominated the world’s vaccine supply. Vaccines in Europe and the United States started being manufactured only by the end of 2020, and it would take them three more months to mass-produce them. Compared with the Chinese vaccine, European and American vaccines had a late start in the world, and the supply of their vaccines was far behind domestic and foreign demand. This left a window of almost six months for the Chinese vaccines to become ubiquitous in the world.
Even if China’s vaccine research skills and manufacturing capacity have reached the same level as that of the United States, the cultivation process of the microorganisms required for clinical trials and vaccine production cannot be compressed or accelerated. Therefore, the shortest time required for China to achieve mass production of vaccines on a large scale should be roughly the same as the United States, which was about one year. However, considering that China’s vaccine had reached the scale of 100 million doses per month in early autumn last year, the CCP must have begun preparation work for microorganism cultivation, screening, testing, and packaging by the fall of 2019.
Chinese authorities claimed that the first patient who was infected with the virus was reported in Wuhan on Dec. 1, 2019, but this lie was overturned by its timeline showing rapid mass production of vaccines. Based on the above information, in the autumn of 2019, the CCP not only had the novel coronavirus in its hands, but also mastered a number of vaccine types that could be used, and even began to prepare for mass vaccine production. It must have made the assumption that the epidemic would soon spread from China to other countries, wreaking havoc around the globe.
CCP Prioritizes Vaccine Exports, Delays Domestic Vaccinations
When the Chinese vaccines were produced at a massive scale, they were not used in China. On the one hand, China stocked hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine, and on the other hand, the vaccines were sent to other countries for clinical trials, opening up the gate for large-scale vaccine export. As early as July 2020, the Sinopharm vaccine started Phase III of clinical trials in the United Arab Emirates. This clinical trial included 40,832 people in the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt and Jordan. Sinovac’s CoronaVac vaccine also started a Phase III trial in Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, and Chile on July 21, 2020. At that time, the United States was still at the initial research stage for vaccine development.
Why didn’t the CCP preemptively announce in June 2020 that it was ready for mass production for Chinese-made vaccines when it was set to arrange clinical trials in other countries?
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Cheng Xiaonong is a scholar of China’s politics and economy based in New Jersey. Cheng was a policy researcher and aide to former Chinese Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang. He also served as chief editor of Modern China Studies.
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