The CoronaVac vaccine against Covid-19, produced by Chinese pharmaceutical firm SinoVac, has been approved for use in 39 countries around the world—with more than 1 billion doses distributed globally already.

Today, I’ll take you through the scientific literature to give you everything you need to know about SinoVac’s effectiveness.

Specifically, I’ll tell you what is known about:

How effective SinoVac is at preventing infection, hospitalization, and death?
How does the effectiveness changes against variants, such as gamma or delta?
How quickly does immunity wane after vaccination?
How does SinoVac compare to other Covid vaccines?

As a bonus, we’ll look at a study that actually ranks vaccines for their effectiveness, according to neutralizing antibody levels.

0:00 Introduction
0:48 How is Vaccine Effectiveness Measured?
3:15 How Effective is Sinovac?
5:48 How do Variants Impact Effectiveness?
8:05 How does Immunity Wane over Time?
9:37 Which Vaccine is the Best?
10:39 What does this mean?

Always remember that this review of scientific literature is not meant to provide medical guidance to individuals. Please follow WHO guidance on vaccines!

Links to Research:

Efficacy and safety of an inactivated whole-virion SARS-CoV-2 vaccine (CoronaVac): interim results of a double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled, phase 3 trial in Turkey | https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21...

Effectiveness of an Inactivated SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine in Chile | https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056...

Effectiveness of the CoronaVac vaccine in older adults during a gamma variant associated epidemic of covid-19 in Brazil: test negative case-control study | https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n2015

Effectiveness of CoronaVac among healthcare workers in the setting of high SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant transmission in Manaus, Brazil: A test-negative case-control study | https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.11...

CoronaVac induces lower neutralising activity against variants of concern than natural infection| https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(21...

Neutralizing antibody levels are highly predictive of immune protection from symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01...

Dynamic of humoral response to SARS-CoV-2 anti Nucleocapsid and Spike proteins after CoronaVac vaccination | https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.11...

Dynamic IgG seropositivity after rollout of CoronaVac and BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccines in Chile: a sentinel surveillance study | https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(21...