‘Any WHO-approved vaccine should be permissible for travel.’

The World Health Organization stated Thursday that any vaccination authorised for emergency use for COVID-19 should be recognised by governments when they open their borders to vaccinated travellers (July 1). The move may put Western countries under pressure to embrace two allegedly less effective Chinese vaccines that the UN health agency has licenced but most European and North American governments have not. In addition to vaccines manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna Inc, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson, the WHO has approved two Chinese vaccines manufactured by Sinovac and Sinopharm.

In order to restore cross-European travel, the European Union announced in May that it would only recognise people as vaccinated if they had received shots licenced by the European Medicines Agency – though individual countries can decide whether to accept travellers who have received other vaccines, such as Russia’s Sputnik V.

The EU’s drug agency is now contemplating approving China’s Sinovac vaccine, but no decision date has been set.
Any measure that only allows people protected by a subset of WHO-approved vaccines to benefit from the reopening of travel would effectively create a two-tier system, widening the global vaccine divide and exacerbating the inequities already evident in the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, according to a WHO statement issued Thursday.

WHO stated that this discriminating strategy will have a severe influence on the growth of countries that are currently suffering the most, and that such efforts undermine trust in life-saving vaccines that have already been proven to be safe and effective. The UN health agency said in its reviews of the two Chinese vaccinations that both were shown to considerably cut the risk of hospitalizations and deaths.

The two Chinese shots are inactivated vaccines manufactured with killed coronavirus, but the Western shots are made with newer technology that target the spike protein that coats the coronavirus’s surface.
Although many Western countries have relied heavily on vaccines manufactured in the United States and Europe, such as Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca, many underdeveloped countries have relied on Chinese-made immunizations.

Earlier this year, the head of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention admitted that the country’s home-grown vaccines were ineffective. Despite relatively high levels of immunisation, many countries that have used millions of doses of the two Chinese injections, like the Seychelles and Bahrain, have observed COVID-19 spikes.