While Beijing continues to dish out Chinese jabs as part of its vaccine diplomacy, skepticism against their effectiveness remains. An epidemiologist from the University of Ottawa has urged Canadian authorities not to approve vaccines from China or Russia.

Raywat Deonandan noted the wide variance in efficacy rates for vaccines produced in China, which ranges from 50% to 90%. Unless researchers can explain the variance in effective rate in different clinical trials, Canada cannot approve the inoculation, he said.

The Canadian government has approved COVID-19 vaccines produced by Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna as well as AstraZeneca. The country is expected to have more than 36.5 million doses by July.

The authorities partnered with Chinese firm CanSino Biologics last year to conduct trials on vaccines. Though contracts were signed, delivery of the samples to Canada – scheduled in May – were blocked by China’s customs agency.

The failed partnership was “a waste of a lot of time,” Scott Halperin, director of the Canadian Center for Vaccinology at the Dalhousie University, which was supposed to run human trials, told the House of Commons committee on Canada-China Relations last week.

“Once we saw that the vaccines were shipped for the phase three studies to Pakistan, we decided that it was a political issue,” he added, blaming the delay on Beijing’s interference. The deal was eventually abandoned in August.

In May last year, Canada also suspended the import of several millions of N95 face masks from China, after they failed to meet federal standards for medical use. Chinese embassy in Ottawa had blamed the incident on a “contractual” issue that has since been resolved.

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