Chinese firm says COVID - 19 vaccine efficacy shows

BEIJING, Sept 22 Reuters - A potential COVID - 19 vaccine from China's Clover Biopharmaceuticals was 67% effective against COVID--19 and 79% against the highly infectious delta variant in a late-stage trial, the company said on Wednesday.

The company is funding a deal to supply up to 414 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine by the global vaccine sharing scheme COVAX.

It said it would submit the test data for conditional approval to the World Health Organization and regulators in China and Europe in the fourth quarter of 2021.

A total of 207 symptomatic COVID cases were reported at least two weeks after the second dose in a large trial.

The remaining 159 cases were from a placebo group and 52 were from vaccinated groups, a Clover representative said.

It conducted gene sequencing analysis on 146 cases and the three most common variants were Delta, Gamma and Mu, accounting for 73% of them. The analysis was 56 Mu cases and 37 Delta cases.

We are pleased that SCB-2019 has successfully demonstrated efficacy against the dominant Delta strain and other concerning variants, Clover CEO Joshua Liang said in a statement.

We believe the SCB - 2019 could be utilised as an essential tool to combat this pandemic. The vaccine showed an 83.7% efficacy against severe disease and 100% against hospitalization and severe cases caused by COVID -19.

The efficacy rates of the candidate, which contains an adjuvant provided by Dynavax, are based on trials involving more than 30,000 participants in the Philippines, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa and Belgium.