Sucking the Covid vaccine into a glass tube: the world’s first inhaled dose is already administered in Shanghai

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At Tianshan Hospital, a stone’s throw from the Shanghai Zoo, they’ve been handing out free mist shots in a plastic highball glass, just like the ones they serve at McDonald’s, but with a spout instead of a straw for several days. The reception was timid at first, but every day Queues swell to test the world’s first inhaled vaccine against Covidwhich is being applied as booster dose and that is administered by sticking a drink to the glass that contains the aerosol of the Chinese serum.

Volunteers passing through the hospital have to inhale, hold their breath for five seconds, and then slowly exhale into the cup. The whole process is completed within 20 seconds. This pilot test can be accessed by of legal age among the 23 million residents in Shanghai that for more than six months have the full guideline of the vaccine. The more than three million who have not yet been inoculated at any dose, or only one, are not invited to try this inhaled vaccine.

“It is recommended not to get vaccinated on an empty stomach. Afterwards, you should drink more water than usual and, preferably, avoid smoking for the next eight hours“suggests one of the hospital nurses who orders the line with the twenty people who have been waiting for their turn since early in the morning.

the inhaled vaccine, approved in September by Chinese regulators, has been developed at the CanSino Biologics facilities, in the port city of Tianjin, in northern China. This pharmaceutical company has had the help of researchers from the Institute of Military Medicine of the Academy of Military Sciences, who have explained that they converted the liquid vaccine into an aerosol using a nebulizer, and that it uses the same ingredient as the traditional recombinant injectable (vector of adenovirus type five: Ad5-nCoV), from a single injection, which CanSino already developed. The company notes that the inhaled versions allow people to induce an immune response on the mucosal surfaces of the nose and mouthwhere the coronavirus is most likely to invade the body.

According to the phase III clinical trial published in the journal The LancetCanSino’s traditional whey had a 57.5% effective in preventing any symptoms and 91.7% in preventing severe disease after four weeks or more after a single administered dose. In spring, The Lancet published another study explaining that the levels of immunity produced by two inhalations of this vaccine 28 days apart reached the same levels as those produced by an intramuscular injection. Instead, these tests were performed with the delta variant and not with micron and its subvariantswhich today is shaking the Asian giant with several sporadic outbreaks spread across various parts of the country.

In Wuhan, home to the world’s first Covid-19 outbreak, dated late 2019, for less than 300 cases in the last 15 days they have confined a central neighborhood where around 800,000 people live. The rest of this population of 11 million can now move freely, although PCR tests must be done every 48 hours. Authorities have linked the Wuhan outbreak to the local pork supply chain. For this reason, the sale of this product has been prohibited in many markets in the city.

More lockdowns are spreading in southern China, specifically in Guangzhou, the Asian giant’s fourth-largest economy, which has sealed off some neighborhoods due to a resurgence of new cases. In the center of the country, a city called Xining, which has more than a million inhabitants, has been completely blocked.

In Xi’an, in the north, a city known because the Terracotta Warriors were discovered there, several neighborhood lockdowns are also being applied following the immutable zero covid policy: to the minimum scare in the form of positives, massive tests and confinements. All this with the extreme dependence on a health application, which works by geolocation, capable of excluding millions of citizens from day to day by changing a simple color code and which gives the State powers that it did not have before to collect each step that the citizen takes.

All the controls are applied in a more radical way, especially in Beijing, where many residents have been trapped in other cities without being able to return because the current policy of the capital says that no one can enter the city if there has been at least one in the place of origin. least one positive case in the previous two weeks.

This week, the figures for new infections barely exceeded a thousand cases in a country where more than 1.4 billion inhabitants live. China, according to official figures, has reported During the entire pandemic, just over a million infections and 5,226 deaths. By mid-October, 90% of the entire population had been vaccinated, and almost 60% had received a booster shot.

The problem is that among the percentage of unvaccinated are around 48 million people over 60 years of age, almost 14% of this age group. Y only 61% of those over 80 years of age have the complete guideline. This reluctance of the elderly is dragging down part of the hopes of many Chinese that some restrictions that will go on for a long time will soon be relaxed.

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