Pfizer/BioNTech Vaccine Produces 10 Times More Antibodies Than Sinovac Jabs

People who received Pfizer/BioNTech's coronavirus vaccine had 10 times the amount of antibodies than those given China's Sinovac, a Hong Kong study has shown, adding to growing data on different jabs' effectiveness, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

The University of Hong Kong (HKU) research, based on a study of 1,442 healthcare workers, was published in Lancet Microbe on Thursday, July 15, 2021. Researchers said antibodies are not the only measure of a vaccine's success at fighting a particular disease.

But they warned that "the difference in concentrations of neutralizing antibodies identified in our study could translate into substantial differences in vaccine effectiveness." Many epidemiologists in Hong Kong prefer Pfizer/BioNTech even as officials root for Sinovac. One clinic that pushed Pfizer was kicked out of the vaccination program.

Those who received Sinovac had "similar or lower" levels of antibodies to those seen in patients who caught and successfully fought off the disease. The study adds to the growing body of evidence that vaccines using pioneering mRNA technology -- such as BioNTech and Moderna -- offer better protection against the coronavirus and its variants than those developed by more traditional methods such as using inactivated virus parts.

Traditional vaccines are cheaper to produce and less complicated to transport and store, making them a vital tool for fighting the pandemic in less wealthy countries.

Epidemiologist Ben Cowling, one of the report's authors, said people should still get vaccinated with Sinovac if there were no other options because some protection was always better than none.

"Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," he told AFP. "It is clearly better to go and get vaccinated with an inactivated vaccine than to wait and not get vaccinated," he added. "Many, many lives have been saved by the inactivated vaccine."

Hong Kong has been a world leader in studying coronaviruses ever since a SARS outbreak which began in southern China swept through the city in 2003. The city currently offers both German-made BioNTech shots and Sinovac. Despite ample supplies, take-up has been slow, with only 28 percent of the city's 7.5 million residents fully vaccinated with two shots. So far some 2.6 million BioNTech doses have been administered compared to 1.8 million Sinovac shots.

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