China Approves COVID-19 Vaccine Candidate For Military Use 113
schwit1 writes: Same vaccine being tested in Canada. But China just skipped ahead and approved it for one year for its soldiers without full long-term data. The COVID-19 vaccine (Ad5-nCoV) in question is developed by China's Academy of Military (AMS) research unit and CanSino Biologics. Clinical trials proved it was safe and showed some efficacy, according to the company.
Reuters says the company has not disclosed whether the inoculation of the vaccine candidate is mandatory or optional, citing commercial secrets. "AMS received an approval earlier this month to test its second experimental coronavirus vaccine in humans," adds Reuters.
Reuters says the company has not disclosed whether the inoculation of the vaccine candidate is mandatory or optional, citing commercial secrets. "AMS received an approval earlier this month to test its second experimental coronavirus vaccine in humans," adds Reuters.
Smart (Score:5, Funny)
India will probably start sending covid-19 infected soldiers (whether intentional or not) to the borders, Chinese soldiers will be at risk of catching the virus next time they wrestle with or capture India soldiers.
Re:Smart (Score:5, Funny)
Even worse, the US will be risking its soldiers by sending them to America. ;)
Re:Smart (Score:5, Funny)
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Even worse, the US will be risking its soldiers by sending them to America. ;)
You think that's bad. Imagine the risk of sending them to Sweden or Brazil.
Seriously, though, there are a bunch of countries like Vietnam, where the US is just rebuilding a relationship, or the Philippines which has been a long term US ally but is now playing with China. Now China can safely send troops through there without accusations of bringing in disease whilst the US troops are effectively excluded. The US failure to do basic public health has now become a major strategic military failure.
Re: Smart (Score:1)
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Yeah, right. (Score:5, Interesting)
... the company has not disclosed whether the inoculation of the vaccine candidate is mandatory or optional, citing commercial secrets.
... the company will not disclose whether the inoculation of the vaccine candidate is mandatory or optional, because the Chinese government won't allow them to admit that the soldiers are forced to be inoculated on pain of imprisonment or death. FTFY
With the Chinese government's lengthy record of abusing human rights, everybody in the world knows the soldiers don't have a choice, so why is the government being coy?
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Or just quit the job? China does not have mandatory military service.
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Or just quit the job? China does not have mandatory military service.
Actually, they do. The vast majority of eligible citizens do not serve as they only need a certain number of soldiers. However, if a local region does not meet its quota with voluntary applicants, conscription will happen. As for quitting, not necessarily possible. There are service commitments once you join, regardless of whether it was voluntary or conscripted.
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... the company has not disclosed whether the inoculation of the vaccine candidate is mandatory or optional, citing commercial secrets.
... the company will not disclose whether the inoculation of the vaccine candidate is mandatory or optional, because the Chinese government won't allow them to admit that the soldiers are forced to be inoculated on pain of imprisonment or death. FTFY
With the Chinese government's lengthy record of abusing human rights, everybody in the world knows the soldiers don't have a choice, so why is the government being coy?
CanSino Biologics Inc is a publicly traded company https://www.bloomberg.com/prof... [bloomberg.com] I'm sure the shareholders are happy with the stocks performance but the moral hazard of a possible mandatory inoculation by Chinese ought to be clear. I expect this to be a question at the annual shareholders meeting if not sooner.
Re:Yeah, right. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm solidly in favor of criticising China for its abuses, but you do know that in the US military you take the medications you're given too, right? You give up even the right to know what they are.
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UK too. Many soldiers claimed they were suffering from "Gulf War Syndrome" caused by the anti-chemical-weapon medication they were required to take in the 90s. I seem to recall the US had many cases too.
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Many civilian medical treatments were used first in the military, before being approved for civilian use. And many military medical treatments are never approved for civilian use. Sounds a lot like human testing to me.
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Good point. And in that case I may be wrong about CanSino's reasons for withholding the information. Any speculation on what their motivation might be?
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Just not wanting to embarrass the PRC is reason enough. They know what side their bread is buttered on.
Re:Yeah, right. (Score:4, Informative)
I'm solidly in favor of criticising China for its abuses, but you do know that in the US military you take the medications you're given too, right? You give up even the right to know what they are.
Can confirm. Former soldier. I took lots of crazy pills and shots - they would sometimes not disclose other than 'it's gonna f*ing hurt, and it's for battle prep". Who knows what experiments were run on my body at the time - we all knew we were US Gov property for our enlistment.
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DId you get any side effects from them?
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That is a difference. But in both cases, people aren't offered the choice. There are certainly legitimate reasons for that, but there have historically also been other reasons.
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I'm solidly in favor of criticising China for its abuses, but you do know that in the US military you take the medications you're given too, right? You give up even the right to know what they are.
That's right. Some of them are like being hit in the arm by a 2X4.
They love that pneumatic gun.
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If you have doubts, look at a country that holds freedom of speech in high regards. And see how many people still believe that Trump never told a single lie as well as having been the best president they had in a long time.
I'm not trying to whatabout here, just giving an example of how keeping up pretenses can be quite effective despite all the evidence to the contrary.
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you should be more worried about U.S soldiers being mass jabbed with unknown and experimental things, and the US armed forces using soldiers and unknowing civilians as biowar test subjects. or US government infecting minorities in human experimentation.
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But I was talking about things like the army spreading a bacteria on populace for test that turned out to actually cause sickness, or giving black women syphillis, or doing lobotomies on minority prisoners, to say nothing of killing crops of an ally populace to drive people to the cities, causing starvation and birth defects. Our government does things that are utterly evil, and truly patriotic citizens need to correct this and stop voting sociopaths into office.
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Using soldiers for experiments is indeed wrong, particularly if no consent is obtained.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
As is torturing their orphans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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China is authoritarianism done by smart but paranoid people. They are neurotically afraid of public disorder, and are well aware that support within the military ranks is not something they can take for granted. So I don't think the PLA is an attractive target.
It would make more sense, in a country with so few controls on research ethics, to experiment on political prisoners and other convicts.
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the Chinese government won't allow them to admit that the soldiers are forced to be inoculated on pain of imprisonment or death
To be fair, US soldiers don't have a choice about receiving vaccinations the military deems necessary either. Death is clearly not one of the eligible punishments, but refusal would have serious consequences, perhaps as serious as other than honorable discharge though I'm sure plenty of lesser remedies would be tried first, starting with a simple chewing out and proceeding to undesirable work details, removal from deployment lists, commander's non-judicial punishment, etc. I expect that the UCMJ charge woul
China (Score:4, Interesting)
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Using the USA as a reference, we can assume "getting the COVID infection" gives you about one chance in 1600-odd of dying. So, "safer than getting COVID infection" requires better than 99.9% safe to meet your criteria.
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- death is not the only effect; severe lung damage is also happening.
- since this diseases is so virulent, the risk of re-transmission is also part of the equation. So the safety of the entire population may be different from the safety of those receiving the vaccine.
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And brain damage, lest we forget.
Because the effects aren't otherwise noticed in 'Murica; it is often overlooked as a side-effect (and sometimes seen as a benefit, especially if you're on track for high-office)
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Psssst, you're interfering with the approved rhetoric.
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I'm not sure if you made a minor error or if my information was out of date.
Last I knew mortality was around 0.5% to maybe 1% based on US data which also resembles what I saw coming out of South Korea early on.
The 1:1600 number gives a chance of 0.06% of death.
Maybe my numbers are out of date. Thought I'd check.
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The early numbers were based on the risk of death among confirmed cases...
But they didn't take into account unconfirmed cases or asymptomatic cases, which weren't known at the time. In places where mass testing was performed, large numbers of asymptomatic cases were discovered which pushed the death rate down since people who dont even show minor symptoms aren't going to die.
Re:China (Score:5, Insightful)
The case fatality rate is in the ballpark of 5-10%. It's believed that up to 90% of cases may be undetected, so you have to divide that by 10 to get an estimate of the infection fatality rate, which gives your 0.5-1%.
OP seems to be doing like many people and dividing *that* by 10. I'd suspect political motives, but basic innumeracy is probably just as likely.
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Last I knew mortality was around 0.5% to maybe
Is fore the entire population. You chances of dying or suffering serious long lasting effects (lets be honest here dying is bad but so is living in poor health) are much greater if you are older 80+ and virtually non-existent if you are young under 10.. according to the data.
So how safe it really needs to be to be a net win various with your age group, other conditions you might have, risk of infection in the first place. However given the overall statistics, a vaccine is going to have to have a very very
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Indeed ... China pushes traditional remedies for COVID-19 amid outbreak [bbc.com].
The article says that Xi himself is an ardent supporter of traditional medicine.
I think it came from France. Marseilles to be exact, with Dr Didier Raoult as a proponent.
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On the other hand , if the damn thing works, its a helll of a way to collect a shitload of data on a shitload of subjects.
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The general rule of thumb is that it has to be a least 70% effective, or else it gives too many a false sense of protection, creating as many cases as it prevents.
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Interestingly that 70% number actually varies by the disease. For most diseases 70-80% is considered the appropriate number, however I've heard for COVID-19 the number is actually a bit lower (somewhere nearer 55-60%) Of course those numbers also assume that everyone gets the vaccine, for every person who doesn't get it, you have to count them as one of the "failed" group meaning that the number for efficacy of a vaccine that not 100% will take has to be higher to compensate.
I'm honestly just waiting for the headline (Score:2)
"China weaponizing Covid vaccine"
Re: I'm honestly just waiting for the headline (Score:2, Insightful)
Too late. They already did that when Chinese known to be infected flew directly from Wuhan to Italy and toured around the country.
Why do you think Italy was the first western country hit? It wasn't random.
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Yeah, because Italy is the most critical country when it comes to world domination. A fiendish, clever plan...
Re: I'm honestly just waiting for the headline (Score:2)
No. It's just that Italy gets more tourists per year that their population (60 million).
Italy in the winter season is the best place to infect every affluent country on earth as all these skiing tourists go back home.
If the intention was to hit the West this was genius...
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Italy? C'mon, if you want to hit rich&influential in Winter, try Austria and even more so Switzerland. Can't hit Europe's elite any harder than that if you try to hit them during vacation.
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That's some great idea right there. Let's kill not only our own people first, because, hey, that's what evil mustache-twirling villains do after all, let's also attack our enemy in a way that ensures it will cripple our economy worst of all because the very first thing they'll do is to limit any kind of traffic, including products, from us.
I don't exactly know, but how dumb do you actually think the Chinese are?
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It would be stranger if it was intentional. Italy certainly isn't going to be on the top of too many people's shit lists.
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except it wasn't.
italy had a few different strains, but not only from china, meaning it wasn't an early vector. phylogenetic analysis indicates sources from china, australia but most of all germany (assumed business meetings) and iran. they did have a helluva local transmission of all those strains, though.
https://www.pnas.org/content/1... [pnas.org]
https://www.eurosurveillance.o... [eurosurveillance.org]
https://europepmc.org/article/... [europepmc.org]
for some reason nextstrain doesn't have detailed mapping for italy. maybe that isn't random. conspiracy!!
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Yup. There are reports with names of the known sick Chinese couple touring around Italy straight from Wuhan in January.
ahh, the old human shell bomb couple trick! how mean!
I'm not going to bother to GTFY;
don't worry, i feel you could use all the effort on educating yourself first.
you'd just dismiss it anyway because it doesn't fit the pro-China-as-good-guys-victim narrative.
Btw, how are your pro-democracy friends in Hong Kong feeling today? Do you even have any idea what's happening in the world or who runs China?
i feel bad abut that. actually, there is a lot of sympathy between both the hong kong and catalonia pro-independence movements. joint activisim and mutual support aren't at all uncommon, at different scales we have the same basic problem in the end: a totalitarian state. there's indeed a lot wrong with china, but that doesn't mean i have to buy all the bullshit anyone pulls out o
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You are so anxious so score points, you don't even finish reading the posts you respond to, do you.
Do you mean "Stolen"? (Score:1)
Placebo effect ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone want to bet that they are just giving "saline injections" instead of actual vaccine to ensure their military thinks it's safe to rough up the protesters ?
Additionally, they want to seem to be ahead of the rest of the world for vaccinations for both political effect and to keep the hopes up of the population.
Anyone want to bet whether Trump tries to pull the same stunt ?
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If you're going to go full-blown conspiracy theory, why not ask: "Why is a virus, that appears to be synthetic, followed by a vaccine that's a "commercial secret"?
Are we to believe that some private organization found a possible vaccine for a virus that's caused a world-wide lock-down, and they're going to Shkreli it? If so, the question then becomes: "How many more goddamned 'Chazes' will pop up, world-wide?"
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Anyone want to bet whether Trump tries to pull the same stunt ?
That is truly delusional.
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Nope. You can 100% guarantee Trump will make sure a vaccine is "approved" before the election (assuming he doesn't drop out - not inconceivable).
I wouldn't want to try it anymore than this Chinese vaccine, but you better believe he's going to jawbone the FDA into approving *something*, or bending the definitions to give him plausible deniability into saying something is approved.
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Nope. You can 100% guarantee Trump will make sure a vaccine is "approved" before the election (assuming he doesn't drop out - not inconceivable).
I 100% guarantee that Nancy Pelosi will have any successful vaccine candidate held up in FDA approval until after the election so the democrats can keep the country in lockdown and the economy tanked. It's the only chance Sleepy Joe has.
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Even if a vaccine is approved pre-election (as I expect), this will have zero effect on ending the lockdown before the election since:
a) Any initial vaccine recipients are not going to be you and me. It'll be going to doctors/nurses or other essential/frontline workers (maybe even to navy crew too - who knows).
b) Manufacturing takes a time to ramp up - you won't see availability in 100M mass quantity until well into next year, and even then let's see how many folk are willing to take it - enough to achieve
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You're talking about the military of an authoritarian government. I don't expect there would be much dissent in the ranks if they were sent into a highly infectious zone without any vaccine, and the Chinese government would certainly do that if it met their interests.
But
1. You have people that you already know are willing to die for their country, at least to some extent. Nobody enters the military ignorant of the dangers; and
2. You will have a substantially more effective fighting force if they're not gett
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Well why not?
This virus has had very little impact on young and healthy people, only older people or those with existing serious medical conditions are being badly affected, yet there are lots of young people who are afraid of catching it.
Soldiers are generally young, fit and healthy because those traits are necessary to be a soldier so most of them are going to either be asymptomatic, or only have minor symptoms. The number of soldiers who get seriously ill or die is going to be absolutely miniscule. On th
Re: If china wants to test it on soldiers, then gr (Score:1)
And they're only a bunch of conscripted foreigners so no big deal if it kills them all or has some other nasty side effect, right? They don't look like you or speak your language so they're no better than lab rats or monkeys to you.
Because quarantine is hard and you really need a beer at the bar with your buddies just like it used to be so why not risk a million rats for your improved convenience and lifestyle?
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Don't put words in people's mouths. A vaccine needs to be tested and it needs human trials. It makes sense to test it in higher risk places first. Hell at this point if I could get my damned hands on one I'd take the trial vaccine myself. Even as a social introvert this situation is becoming untenable and there's nowhere in the world you can really go to get away from it.
Re: If china wants to test it on soldiers, then g (Score:1)
No words were out in his mouth. He was super clear what he said. And no, we don't need conscripts testing vaccines.
It reeks of Josef Mengele. You do know who he was, right?
Or closer to home, the syphilis testing the US did on unsuspecting blacks in the 50s?
Those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.
My 11 year old had higher ethical standards than I'm seeing here.
The anti-vaxxers will love this (Score:3)
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More info on such vaccines. [statnews.com]
It's basically a common virus with Covid-like parts "glued on". Sometimes the immune system develops recognition (immunity) to the Covid-like parts, the desired result; but other times it recognizes parts of the original virus from earlier infections, focuses on those, and thus skips Covid-oriented immunity.
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So in other words, this is pretty much guaranteed to be a vaccine against something (and as it's likely a modified version of an existing vaccine, we have a decent guess at the safety and efficacy numbers), we just don't yet know if it will be against covid or not.
That sounds like a great candidate for human trials, and I can definitely see why a government (any government) would use the military for such testing. The risk is relatively low (by military standards), and there's a huge potential reward.
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You don't know the risk until you test it ...
One of the potential risks is Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) whereby vaccine-induced antibodies actually enhance the disease they are meant to be fighting against if you are exposed to it.
It's a real risk - I believe this was why attempts to make a vaccine for SARS-CV (i.e. SARS) failed, and covid-19's SARS-CV2 is 80% similar ...
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Hence the great candidate for tests statement...
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you do know that this story is about China skipping tests and going right to approving it for military use, right?
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No, it's about China doing tests using the military as the test subjects.
Same thing done in pretty much every country in the world on a routine basis.
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The adenovirus used for the vaccine is not one that has been circulating in humans. So there shouldn't be recognizing from earlier infections, at least not to a large extent. There also have been parts removed from the virus to reduce its virulesence, and the preliminary studies indicate that therefore it is also safe for patients who are immunocompromized.
The million dollar quesiton that cannot be yet answered, though, is that does the vaccine prevent spreading the virus, or does it just make the infection
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I know. It's disappointing, and also entirely unnecessary - child mutilation is wrong no matter who is doing it, whether they're in Africa, America or any other country.
Don't mutilate babies.
Translation: (Score:1)
China is doing medical testing on army "volunteers" after running out of healthy Muslim, dissident and gay "volunteers".
Mandatory (Score:2)
Reuters says the company has not disclosed whether the inoculation of the vaccine candidate is mandatory or optional, citing commercial secrets.
Given dictatorships exist to be kleptocracies, this may be the one true statement from China for decades.
Stupid. VERY STUPID (Score:2)
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China is in 2 wars currently.
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Personally, I have no issue with the Chinese. Nearly all are like anybody else; they just want to live and enjoy life.
I wish no ill on them. And a bad vaccine is a HORRIBLE way to suffer.
"No chickens will be eaten." (Score:1)
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China unleashing a weapon that:
- kills anti-vaxxers;
- makes Americans hate each other even more;
- predominantly reduces their elderly population.
... is truly evil, but evil genius.