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Sinovac Biotech’s vaccine is wiping out the coronavirus among health workers in Indonesia, an encouraging sign for the dozens of developing countries reliant on the Chinese shot that performed far worse than Western vaccines in clinical trials.

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

Dhewantara also said 94 per cent 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. Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin revealed a smaller version of the study involving 25,374 people in a Tuesday interview with Bloomberg that had the same effectiveness data for hospitalisation and infection. Protection against death was 100 per cent in the smaller group.

“We see a very, very drastic drop,” in hospitalisations and deaths among medical workers, Sadikin said. It’s not known which 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 adds 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 and questions over data transparency. Results from its Phase III trial in Brazil put the shot known as CoronaVac’s efficacy at just above 50 per cent, the lowest among all first-generation coronavirus vaccines.

A spokesman for Sinovac in Beijing said the company cannot comment on the Indonesian study until it acquires more details.

The Indonesian study compared vaccinated people with nonvaccinated people to derive the estimated effectiveness. The median age of the participants is 31 years old.

In a separate interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday, Sinovac CEO Yin Weidong defended the disparity in clinical data around the shot, and said there was growing evidence that 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 majority of people to be vaccinated, a scenario that developing countries with poor health infrastructure and limited access to shots cannot reach quickly. In the Indonesian health-worker study, and another in a Brazilian town of 45,000 people called Serrana, nearly 100 per cent of people studied were fully vaccinated, with serious illness and deaths dropping after they were inoculated.