SINOVAC Biotech Ltd.’s vaccine is wiping out COVID-19 among health workers in Indonesia, an encouraging sign for the dozens of developing countries reliant on the Chinese shot.

Indonesia tracked 128,290 health workers in capital city Jakarta from January to March and found that the vaccine protected 98 percent of them from death and 96 percent from hospitalization as soon as seven days after the second dose, Pandji Dhewantara, a Health Ministry official who oversaw the study, said yesterday.

Dhewantara also said that 94 percent of the workers had been protected against symptomatic infection, an extraordinary result that goes beyond what was measured in the shot’s numerous clinical trials.

Indonesia’s Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin earlier revealed a smaller version of the study involving 25,374 people in a Tuesday interview that had the same effectiveness data for hospitalization and infection. Protection against death was 100 percent in the smaller group.

“We see a very, very drastic drop” in hospitalizations and deaths among medical workers, Sadikin said. It’s not known what strain of the coronavirus Sinovac’s shot worked against in Indonesia, but the country has not flagged any major outbreaks driven by variants of concern.

The data add to signs out of Brazil that the Sinovac shot is more effective than it proved in the testing phase, which was beset by divergent efficacy rates. Results from its biggest Phase III trial in Brazil put the efficacy of the shot, known as CoronaVac, at just above 50 percent.

The Indonesian study compared vaccinated against non-vaccinated people to derive the estimated effectiveness.

In a interview Tuesday, Sinovac’s CEO Yin Weidong defended the disparity in clinical data around the shot and said there was growing evidence CoronaVac is performing better when applied in the real world.

But the real world examples also show that the Sinovac shot’s ability to quell outbreaks requires the vast majority of people to be vaccinated, a scenario that developing countries with limited access to shots cannot reach quickly.

In the Indonesian study, and another in a Brazilian town of 45,000 people called Serrana, nearly 100 percent of people studied were fully vaccinated, with serious illness and deaths dropping after they were inoculated. (SD-Agencies)