Keeping tabs on Covid-19: Asia lags in vaccine roll outs and new South Korean drug marked as a “game changer”

Are Asian countries undermining successes in curbing the pandemic with slow vaccine roll outs?

Compared to the US and countries in Europe, Asian states are beginning to emerge as laggards in the battle against Covid-19 with only five per cent of the total population vaccinated to date, versus 49 per cent of the total population vaccinated in the US, according to Our World in Data.

Problems with Covid-19 vaccine roll outs vary from country to country in Asia, but the lack of vaccines to administer remains a constant hurdle.

Despite Asia being classified as the “factory of the world” and making up an increasingly dominant share of the global manufacturing economy, the majority of the 160 million Covid-19 vaccinations that had been produced globally by early-March 2021 had been administered in the US and across Europe, the BBC reported.

Japan has been given just 6.3 doses of the vaccine per 100 people, India has administered only 14 injections per 100 people, and China, which were successful in creating its own vaccines, has only 36 doses available to give per 100 people, according to the Financial Times.

In South-East Asia, immunization campaigns have barely begun in Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines.

The Thai government in particular has come under sharp criticism for how it has handled the vaccination roll out. Thailand has been slow to procure vaccines and relied heavily on AstraZeneca as the single manufacturer for its supply.

Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, a Thai politician for the Future Forward Party, told DW: “When the vaccine strategy was formulated in the third quarter [of 2020], the number of new daily infections was really low, so the government underestimated the situation and thought they could control the spread of the coronavirus.”

Similarly, with Japan marking the unwelcome milestone of 10,000 Covid-19 deaths in April 2021, public frustrations over its slow vaccine roll out is also intensifying after it emerged that the European Union has approved more than 50 million Covid-19 shots for export to Japan.

The Japanese government announced it was planning to implement more resources to roll out the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Japan Health Minister Norihisa Tamura gave his final approval last week for emergency use of the Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccine in Japan, in the hope to speed up the vaccine roll out.

New Covid-19 drug from South Korea classified as a “game changer” in pre-clinical trial test

South Korean pharmaceutical company CNPharm is doubling down on efforts to become the first to deliver an oral medicine for Covid-19 symptoms. The company has released pre-clinical trial test results for a niclosamide-based oral treatment for Covid-19 that could compete with the success of other oral Covid-19 drugs being developed by iosBio, Merck, Pfizer and Roche and Tamiflu.

A single dose of CNPharm’s oral Covid-19 drug, CP-COV03, was administered to a group of rats during the testing stage and results revealed it has a positive effect for combatting flu viruses.

CNPharm’s research disclosed niclosamide, the active pharmaceutical ingredient of CP-COV03, not only inhibited a viral replication as other antiviral drug candidates do, but also degraded and eliminated the virus within the cell, as well as preventing lung damage caused by coronavirus.

Hyundai Bioscience, CNPharm’s sister company, said: “The vivo study is an indicator that the therapeutic window of this drug is wide enough not only to increase its possibility of success as an antiviral drug, but also has the potential to be classed a “game changing” candidate in the big pharma space for combatting Covid-19.”

Hyundai Bioscience claimed CP-COV03 was ready to proceed to clinical trials in South Korea and planned to simultaneously seek collaboration or licensing opportunities with global pharmaceutical companies to speed up its development.

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