Many people in Singapore today flocked to private clinics to get Sinovac’s Covid-19 vaccine on the first day this product was used.
Singapore allows private medical facilities to use the Sinovac vaccine, after the World Health Organization (WHO) approved the emergency use of this product earlier this month.
Singapore officials selected 24 private clinics to inject 200,000 doses of Sinovac vaccine in the reserve.
Singaporeans lined up waiting to register for Sinovac’s Covid-19 vaccine outside a clinic on June 17.
Serena Wee, executive director of Icon Cancer Center, said about 1,000 people have signed up for the shot, exceeding the facility’s reserve of 200 doses.
Wee Healthfirst, another private clinic licensed to administer Covid-19 vaccines, said it had stopped accepting Sinovac vaccine applications until June 24 due to `overwhelming demand`.
Engineer Tang Guang Yu, 49 years old, is one of the Chinese citizens living in Singapore who decided to wait to be vaccinated with Sinovac vaccine instead of products from other countries because of concerns that they may not be recognized by Chinese authorities.
`No one wants to be quarantined for a month. I don’t have that many days off,` Tang said.
Some others expressed confidence in the Sinovac vaccine because this product uses traditional technology, while the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are developed on newly developed messenger RNA (mRNA) technology.
Nearly half of Singapore’s 5.7 million people have been vaccinated with at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which were more than 90% effective in clinical trials.
Indonesian officials said on June 17 that more than 350 healthcare workers were infected with nCoV despite being vaccinated with Sinovac’s vaccine, dozens of whom were hospitalized.
Some recent information on social networks suggests that inactivated Covid-19 vaccines like Sinovac’s products are better able to fight the new nCoV variant than mRNA vaccines, others say that mRNA vaccines are less safe.
