Chinese COVID vaccine (II) : Is it safe?

IS THE COVID-19 VACCINE SAFE?

China attaches high importance to the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines during research and development. Every vaccine has gone through rigorous testing for safety and effectiveness.

The general stages of the development process of a vaccine are: exploratory stage, pre-clinical stage, clinical tests, regulatory review and approval, manufacturing and quality control.

Safety trials begin in the lab, with tests and research on cells and animals. As long as the safety data from the labs is good, scientists can move on to human studies. At this stage, trials would be carried out on a large population scale to see whether volunteers vaccinated actually reduce the possibility to get disease. This is also the reason why China jointly conduct the phase III trials with countries who suffer from relatively high infection rate.

China now has 14 vaccines in clinical trials, five of them in last-stage. In the case of COVID-19 vaccines, though the trials have progressed through development very rapidly, they haven't skipped any steps. Chinese government always puts vaccine's safety and efficacy in the first place, and Chinese companies have been developing vaccines in strict accordance with laws and regulations, following scientific laws and regulatory requirements.