First batch of Chinese vaccine arrives in Turkey this week, raising concerns about opaque data

Turkey will receive its first shipment of the new crown vaccine from China by Thursday this week, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said Monday.

A Reuters report said Turkey has agreed to buy 50 million doses of the vaccine (CoronaVac) from Kexing and expects the first delivery of 3 million doses on Monday. In addition, Turkey will also purchase 4.5 million doses of the vaccine developed by Ruihui, with an option to obtain another 30 million doses at a later date.

Reuters also reports that data on the effectiveness of the Coxin vaccine is extremely incomplete and even conflicting. For example, Turkish researchers said last Thursday that the vaccine was 91.25 percent effective, according to an interim analysis, but on the same day, data published in Brazil said the vaccine was between 50 percent and 90 percent effective.

The way the sporadic releases about the Coxin vaccine have been made has caused some confusion as well as negative effects, the report said. Dicky Budiman, an expert at the University of Queensland in Australia, was quoted as saying, “There should be a very clear and transparent analysis, and transparency is precisely one of the biggest problems in China, especially when it comes to vaccines, but also because of its past record.”