HEALTH and Child Care deputy minister John Mangwiro has told Senate that the Sinopharm vaccine from China does not need further studies as it has been extensively researched on internationally and locally to check its effectiveness against COVID-19.
Mangwiro said this last Thursday while responding to
questions from senators on the effectiveness and possible side effects of the
vaccine, whose 200 000 donated doses are already being distributed to different
provinces.
“Before it is administered on people, we have what we call
the World Health Organisation which writes to confirm that yes, this vaccine
does work, and for example, to see how it works, it can be administered on a
sample of five or ten healthy young men.
“We can have university students being experimented on to
see how this vaccine works. What we have now in the country is a vaccine that
has been dealt with already,” Mangwiro said.
“They have studied it fully. We cannot continue to do
further studies on the vaccine, we have what we call Medicines Control
Authority of Zimbabwe that has the mandate to look at issues related to
this. They do extensive research on such
matters to obtain full details of how the vaccine works. They even reach out to countries as far as
Chile, countries that would have volunteered to do such experiments,” he said.
Mangwiro said no vaccines were rolled out without being
thoroughly looked at to study their side effects.
On the issue of 61% of the infected people in the country
who have the South African variant of COVID-19, Mangwiro said: “There is nothing to be afraid of, variants
will continue coming on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. The virus is also
trying to fight the efforts to thwart it so that it is ever changing on a daily
basis.”
Vice-President and Health and Child Care minister
Constantino Chiwenga also told senators that there were now 22 variants of the
virus in the world as it tried to constantly mutate.
Mangwiro said normally pregnant women and breastfeeding
mothers do not get vaccinated because of the side effects of the medicines.
“However, if we find a vaccine which stipulates that we
must do that; then we may, but due to the side effects of the virus — some may
react and faint because their blood pressure would have lowered.”
He said whenever side effects occurred during the
inoculation exercise, there will be trays loaded with adrenalin, drips and
needles to administer to those individuals that would have reacted to the
vaccine. Newsday
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