Business 13 July 2021, 5:27pm

Budapest testing finds Sinopharm vaccine offers insufficient antibody protection

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Nearly a quarter of people above 60 who have been vaccinated using the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine have no antibody protection, the initial results of coronavirus antibody tests in Budapest show. The tests, initiated by the Budapest council and district local governments early, found that the other 5 vaccines in use in Hungary provided sufficient protection, 24.hu reported.

The voluntary tests analysed the results of 1,760 people. As the participants were not picked at random and no weighting was used, this does not constitute a representative sample of Budapest residents above 60.

The IgG antibody was present in 100% of those vaccinated using the AstraZeneca, Janssen or Moderna vaccine. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was found to offer 99.25% antibody protection, and the Russian Sputnik V vaccine 94.53%. Meanwhile, only 76.1% of Sinopharm recipients had antibodies. (This was the largest group in the survey, with nearly 1,200 people.)

According to the latest data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), more than 2 million people above 60 have been vaccinated in Hungary, 568,000 of them using the Chinese vaccine.

In related news, health minister Miklós Kásler on Tuesday said the government could decide on third shots his Wednesday, broken down by vaccine type.

Cover photo: Getty Images