China’s Sinovac ‘ready’ for Disease X

 Sinovac, the Chinese biopharmaceutical company which developed the CoronaVac vaccine against COVID-19, is “ready and very confident” in its capacity to deal with the hypothetical emergence of a new virus, a senior executive of the company has said.

“A lot of countries and companies are concerned about that,” Dr. Chen Kunning, Senior Secretary of the Scientific Committee of Sinovac, told Armenpress at a press conference in Beijing when asked about the company’s readiness to swiftly develop a vaccine in case of an outbreak of a novel virus.

A hypothetical, unknown pathogen that could cause a future epidemic is referred to as Disease X.

“Actually, Sinovac has a lot of experience in dealing with the sudden outbreak of a newly emerged disease,” Dr. Kunning added.

Dr. Kunning reminded that Sinovac, which developed vaccines against, among others, Hepatitis A, Enterovirus 71, varicella, was the first company in the world to develop a vaccine against SARS-CoV-1 when the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak began in 2003. 

“During SARS, in 2003, we developed the first SARS vaccine in the world, and we finished the clinical 1 phase of the SARS vaccine, and that actually gives us a lot of base, that’s why we have a lot of experience, we were ready for preparing the SARS-CoV-2 [COVID-19] vaccine,” she said. “And we have a lot of experience for the outbreak of influenza, and the fastest record is 87 days from research to market, for emergency use influenza vaccine. We are always prepared. Right now, we have more confidence about the next one, because we do have a lot of more intelligence, more research organizations we are cooperating with, we have a lot of new facilities that can help us with supporting in dealing with very tricky diseases, so I think we are always prepared and we are very confident with dealing with the next pandemic.”