NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP via Getty Images
29 Jun 2021
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of Thailand warned Tuesday that it had discovered 110 defective doses of the coronavirus vaccine by Chinese corporation Sinovac Biotech, unusable due to what the media outlet Coconuts described as “lumps of gel” trapped in the dose bottles.
Sinovac was the first Chinese company to debut a Chinese coronavirus vaccine, made with inactivated cells of the coronavirus itself — a contrast to the top American vaccines, by firms Pfizer and Moderna, that use unprecedented mRNA technology to trigger an immune response. Other vaccines in global distribution, like those produced by American company Johnson & Johnson and European company AstraZeneca, use inactivated cells of a different virus — in their case, the common cold-causing adenovirus — to deliver “spike proteins” present on the outside of Chinese coronavirus cells.