Today, let's talk about vaccines A few days ago, British daily newspaper Financial Times published an article which mentioned that American Company Moderna has negotiated with China about the issue of vaccine technology transfer for several years As a result, no consensus was reached, the negotiation broke down So, the titles of many media were like "Moderna says no to China" It is said that a reporter of the Financial Times interviewed Moderna and the negotiators responsible for negotiating with the Chinese government revealed that in fact, for foreign vaccine companies, the Chinese government opened up two paths for them to enter the Chinese market One path is that, to transfer all your vaccine production technologies to Chinese partners after that, your vaccine products can enter the Chinese market Another path is that you can cooperate with Chinese partners in the Chinese market and then you keep your core technology Moderna hoped to follow the second technology path but the Chinese government only pointed at the first path, asking Moderna to enter This second path is actually an agreement that Pfizer has reached with China For example, Pfizer cooperated with China's Fosun Pharma at that time to manufacture a vaccine in China and the name of this vaccine has already been given, called Fubitai (an mRNA vaccine researched and developed (R&Ded) by German company BioNTech) We all know that Fubitai sounds like a Chinese name but actually, in the whole R&D process of the vaccine, Fosun Pharma hasn't been involved at all it just spent a little money on the initial R&D expenses After the vaccine came out in China, Fosun Pharma was responsible for conducting the technical and administrative approval of the Market Supervision and Approval Department and this vaccine can enter the Chinese market after it's been approved and both parties share the money earned So, Moderna wanted to follow the lead of Pfizer But the Chinese government didn't allow so, no consensus has ever been reached during the whole negotiation from 2020 to 2021 But in fact, regarding Pfizer although Fosun Pharma got Fubitai now the pandemic is almost over Fubitai still hasn't entered the Chinese market At that time Fosun Pharma was preparing to build a factory in China they formed a sales team and ordered 100 million doses of vaccines But in the end, these 100 million doses of vaccines have never entered the Chinese mainland market one batch was sold to Hong Kong, one batch to Taiwan and lastly, one batch to Singapore before they were about to expire so, mainland China has never actually seen Pfizer vaccine Well, we never know if those government leaders have seen it or not anyway, ordinary citizens, ordinary people haven't been inoculated with Pfizer vaccine So, what do we think of this? First of all, let's talk about why the Chinese government especially wanted to obtain this technology from Moderna As we know, vaccine technologies are actually categorized into these several types The first type is called the inactivated vaccine Inactivated vaccines were the technology that was born when vaccines were just invented Its principle is very simple Aren't these infectious diseases caused by viruses? So, you put these viruses in a Petri dish to culture them After they're cultured, by physical or chemical means you kill the viability of the virus After the virus viability was completely killed, on the outside, the surface antigen of the virus must be retained in this case, after you injected the virus with a dead core into the human body the human body would generate an immune response and you won't be infected with the disease while generating an immune response thus a protective immune barrier is established This is how inactivated vaccines work China's Sinovac vaccine is an inactivated vaccine besides, there's a vaccine called the attenuated vaccine which also belongs to the scope of inactivated vaccines The second type of vaccine is called the adenovirus-based vaccine Actually, it uses the technology of recombinant protein through recombinant protein, forms the contents of the vaccine into such a substance that is injected into the human body Well, I can't explain it clearly as the specific principles are too complicated This is the second type There is a company in China called CanSino The vaccine produced by CanSino is called the adenovirus-based vaccine Well, the vaccines produced by Moderna and Pfizer are unlike the previous two technologies This type of vaccine is called the mRNA vaccine It's actually a third-generation vaccine People made an analogy that inactivated vaccines, attenuated vaccines or adenovirus-based vaccines are all like cold weapons while mRNA vaccines are like machine guns and cannons That is to say, there is actually a generational difference in technologies So, what are its characteristics compared with traditional vaccines? There are several aspects The first aspect is safety This mRNA vaccine is actually just a segment gene coding segment, RNA coding segment It does not enter the human nucleus only enter the cytoplasm Inside the cytoplasm, it utilizes the human body's own genetic material to form antibodies and antigens and lastly, the human body generates an immune response So, since it doesn't enter the nucleus it doesn't have the possibility and risk of this RNA segment inserting in the genetic material of a human body Therefore, it's much safer than inactivated vaccines and it has far fewer side effects Considering the current market reaction mRNA vaccines are indeed much safer than inactivated and adenovirus-based vaccines This is the first aspect The second aspect is that the protective effect is good Now the overall protection of this mRMA vaccine is around 90% but about our inactivated vaccine perhaps it's only 65% That is to say, 3 injections of an inactivated vaccine on average can achieve the effect of 1 injection of an mRNA vaccine Then you see, that's too far behind How could 3 injections be the same as 1 injection? If you compare mobilizing the whole society for 1 injection with mobilizing the whole society for 3 injections the difficulty of mobilization is not on the same level so, regarding the protective barrier mRNA vaccines are much better Now countries like Singapore and Mexico have eliminated the inactivated vaccine from their vaccine list, not gonna use it Although the inactivated vaccine still offers 65% protection they won't use it anymore, because there are better ones why do they use the less effective one? The third aspect is the long-term protection that is, the protection of mRNA vaccines lasts significantly longer than inactivated vaccines For inactivated vaccines, maybe after 6 months its protection would be gone then you have to get injected again Some even have decayed to almost zero protection in merely 3 months So, compared with mRNA vaccines this is another huge disadvantage The fourth aspect is easy production and short production cycle We all know that this pandemic has a very important feature that is, it mutates fast The outbreak of our COVID-19 started with the Wuhan virus strain and then Delta from South Africa, as everyone knows and then came out Omicron it mutates very, very fast There are actually several variants of Omicron in the middle So, for traditional inactivated vaccines, from R&D to production to appearing on the market generally speaking, this cycle takes about 8-10 months even a year Then think about it, this virus may have mutated several times For example, you follow the Delta strain to design an inactivated vaccine by the time you launch it onto the market, Delta is already gone all turned into Omicron So think about it, you follow the virus ass to make this vaccine then the immunity is too far behind But this mRNA vaccine is different How short can the production cycle of an mRNA vaccine be? After it finds out the sequence of a virus it could go through trial production after 40 days Think about this speed, compared with those traditional vaccines in the past they're not on the same level So, it can quickly R&D a booster targeting the mutations of the virus and it only needs to slightly modify on the basis of the original vaccine So, its entire production process is actually much simpler than before It has a high technology threshold but its production threshold is actually not high These are the characteristics of mRNA vaccines Then think about it, its effect is really good More importantly about this mRNA technology in fact, it wasn't for producing vaccines in the first place After the technology was invented biological scientists around the world hoped that it can show its talents in the field of anticancer drugs Because it is actually a protein expression technology Therefore, if China really masters this technology it would not only enable the technologies of China's vaccine industry to break through a platform and spans an era Moreover, it would also make China's entire biopharmaceutical level to raise a notch We all know that there are many rare diseases nowadays these rare diseases in the past For example, these diseases caused by missing or mutation of genetic information actually cannot be cured by our traditional medicines such as hemophilia, we're actually unable to cure it and it is caused by a genetic defect But with the development of genetic technology and the development of mRNA Technology In the future, these diseases can be solved with one shot, completely cured So, think about the Chinese government's attitude towards this kind of drugs How couldn't they drool over such technology? So, I personally think that it's understandable that the Chinese government wants to acquire this technology Come back to talk about the Chinese government about the vaccine selection strategy throughout the anti-epidemic period When the epidemic just started the Chinese government must have asked domestic enterprises to R&D vaccines like hell so these domestic enterprises began to tackle vaccine technology by all means such as Sinovac, actually it's just an inactivated vaccine Although this method was a bit dumb, it was kind of reliable they made a boatload of money being the first to launch vaccines onto the market Sinovac earned 50 billion last year Besides, CanSino BIO also produced inhaled vaccines Afterwards, many of these vaccines were exported abroad At the same time, the Chinese government, actually just my guess It actually has planned to firstly use these ordinary vaccines to establish a basic protective barrier and then to encourage domestic enterprises to R&D mRNA vaccines and then as a last resort, to transfer technology from foreign enterprises and finally, we got this most advanced vaccine and have another round of injection in our country We all know that the vaccine of mRNA technology was actually successfully R&Ded after this covid-19 epidemic there was no mRNA vaccine in the past When inactivated vaccines were made in China in the past The US was working on the vaccine of mRNA technology At that time, China thought that the US cannot make it You can check online that when Gao Fu was interviewed people asked, why did China choose the path of inactivated vaccines? Why did the US choose the path of mRNA technology? Gao Fu even said that the US doesn't have the conditions to produce inactivated vaccines like China they're not able to make it It made people think that inactivated vaccines are more advanced than mRNA technology But later he didn't expect that Moderna as well as Pfizer both made it After they made it, actually the differences in effect began to show But now the problem is that these domestic enterprises that have been engaging in the technology of mRNA vaccines are a bit disappointing At the beginning, more than a dozen companies swarmed including BGI Genomics Later, these companies gradually gave up. Why? Among the mRNA technologies, there is a delivery technology which is the core technology of the highest difficulty that ordinary companies cannot solve China's biopharmaceutical enterprises are kind of good at imitating but speaking of originality they have a long way to go compared with these first-class enterprises in the world Therefore, they got stuck when encountering key technical bottlenecks Now to be honest, basically there's only enterprise still struggling with mRNA technology This enterprise is called Walvax Biotechnology Walvax Biotechnology is an enterprise based in Yunnan Province and at its own production base it built the mRNA production workshop Its Phase III clinical trial has started in July of last year it's been over a year now, but no results The entire production workshop is 99.47% completed but the last 0.53% just cannot be completed To put it bluntly, it's been stuck at launching vaccines onto the market It's reasonable to speculate that Walvax Biotechnology, regarding the vaccine of mRNA technology has encountered some technical bottlenecks So, China's domestic mRNA technology still hasn't broken through key technical barriers In this context, the Chinese government may want to talk to Moderna and Pfizer to take the technology from their hands If they sell it in China after getting it and giving it a name like Fubitai it would give people the impression that it's our Chinese domestic product This could be considered as a second-best option. But they didn't expect that no consensus was reached, why no consensus was reached? I think we need to know that in Chinese history the many take-offs of Chinese manufacturing industry has a lot to do with our strategy of "market in exchange for technology" Think about the time when China just began its reform and opening-up Our white goods were completely dominated by Japanese and Korean home appliances Chinese people could buy a washing machine with almost a month's salary could buy a TV with a year's salary At that time, washing machines and TV sets were big items People who went abroad always brought refrigerators and washing machines back home Why? The quality of domestic products is too poor Later, China adopted the strategy of "market in exchange for technology" by inviting Japanese and Korean enterprises to China to establish joint ventures with Chinese enterprises, to transfer technology to produce in China, and they could also make money while making money, Chinese enterprises slowly mastered the core technologies of these white goods Finally, China's white goods industry really has grown even turned from a guest into a host as it began to defeat Japan Now in the Japanese market, there are already some Chinese white goods for example, Chinese TV and washing machines have gradually begun to enter the Japanese market This is a very successful precedent And another example, the automobile industry We all know that, in the early years, China's automobile industry had two automobile manufacturers The First Automobile Works (FAW) and the Second Automobile Works (SAW), other than that, there was none But FAW and SAW mainly produced trucks, Jiefang trucks and the sedan they could produce was called Jiefang sedan which only served the party and national leaders but the Jiefang sedan was actually built by imitating a European sedan called GAZ But how far behind was China's production capacity back then? In the final stage of the production cycle of Hongqi sedan, built a total of only more than 1000 or more than 4000 sedans I don't remember the exact number But think about it, other people had no chance to sit in a sedan made in China Therefore, after the reform and opening-up, China's automobile manufacturing industry compared with the Western automobile manufacturing industry was almost a few decades behind So, China adopted the strategy of "market in exchange for technology" to negotiate with automobile manufacturers in western countries such as Germany's Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Japan's Nissan They invited these companies to China to establish joint ventures besides, China must hold 51% of the shares At the same time, these car manufacturers must transfer technologies to Chinese manufacturers to let Chinese manufacturers slowly start to master automobile technologies I still remember when Japan built factories in China a sedan called Xiali was manufactured in Tianjin actually Xiali automobiles had been eliminated in Japan but to China, it was still very advanced to manufacture them The first sedan that many of my colleagues bought at that time was Xiali later became Fukang, and then Santana In fact, these models were eliminated in these countries at that time but in China it had become very advanced But it was in such context that China's automobile industry has been slowly growing You can imagine now China is the world's largest automobile manufacturing country Chinese cars are even starting to be exported and China has also cultivated its own local automobile enterprises such as BYD its car sales have exceeded 200,000 per month and it owns all the intellectual property So, if there was no such strategy of "market in exchange for technology" do you think that China's automobile industry can grow? And there's another more successful example, China's high-speed rail We all know that, originally there were all green trains in China The green train rattled, rattled, rattled with a speed of 40km per hour or even lower At that time, foreign countries entered the era of high-speed rail China's Deng Xiaoping was so envious when he visited Japan's Shinkansen At that time, Deng Xiaoping said that "we will also build this in the future" But if we make it all by ourselves, we might not be able to make it till the cows come home So, when Liu Zhijun was the Minister of Railways On one hand he focused on speeding up, on the other hand he organized Chinese enterprises to negotiate with foreign enterprises that owned the core technology of high-speed rail At that time there were Germany's Siemens, a French company, a Canadian company and a Japanese company, and these four started to compete and then China took the advantage of the contradictions among them to disintegrate them Finally, the core technology of high-speed rail was basically obtained And then China did R&D based on that and generated China's own high-speed rail technology Nowadays China's high-speed rail has become China's business card China is the country with the longest high-speed rail mileage in the world and China itself has now started exporting the high-speed rail technology These are successful cases Now we come back to talk about vaccines Why did China fail at the introduction of vaccines? Why didn't Moderna buy China's strategy of "market in exchange for technology"? Let's analyze it. I think there're the following reasons First, this technology is very advanced For Moderna company, this mRNA technology is its core technology, its foundation of life The company was established merely in 2010, and it was listed in 2018 Its issue price was 23 USD per share, and it financed 600 million USD which set a record for the IPO of a biopharmaceutical company in the US market so, the market is highly optimistic about its mRNA technology Now if you go check out Moderna's R&D pipeline (you'll find out that) it has 24 clinical drugs related to mRNA technology that are being tested So, for Moderna this mRNA technology is its lifeblood that cannot be easily transferred to China Think about how China has been like? That is, China's key technology thresholds have been difficult to break through but once they have been broken through, the crazy expansion made the manufacturing level so intimidating that many technology industries in Western countries feel scared when thinking of it We all know PD-1, the drug for cancer Before China overcame it, before China successfully tackled the key problems the annual treatment cost was about 1 million Chinese Yuan but since China conquered this technology last year and the year before last year now the annual treatment cost could be reduced to 30,000 Chinese Yuan You see this is the difference, so think about if Moderna is afraid or not So, I guess Moderna feels a little panicky facing that kind of competitions in China so it wasn't willing to transfer (its technology), this is the first reason The second reason is that I think China's vaccines are not only used in the field of public health they're actually a bit politicized We all know that when the epidemic first started, wasn't it that China got Fubitai? and Fubitai obtained the sales dealership of the Pfizer vaccine in the entire Greater China At that time, there was no vaccine in Taiwan, so it was eager to buy vaccines but it was requested to must recognize the One China principle when it wanted to buy from Fubitai Taiwan didn't want to, so it went to Pfizer to buy it it went directly to buy from that company in Germany but the dealership has already been sold to Fosun Pharma So it got stuck here And Taiwan thought that China has politicized vaccines So, many people think that once China has mastered a very advanced technology then it would take its politicized measures to exert its influence in the international community This worry is also doubtful For example, when China started the Belt and Road Initiative, it sent and sold vaccines and at that time, it was also competing with the US Before the vaccine came out in the US China's Sinovac vaccine became a very important diplomatic weapon for opening up its diplomatic paradigm during China's Belt and Road Initiative This is the second reason, which is also worrying About the third reason you can go back to what we said about China's strategy of "market in exchange for technology" What era was that? It was an era when China and Western countries having relatively harmonious relations So in that case, the strategy of "market in exchange for technology" could be a win-win and they weren't too worried. But now, it's no longer what it used to be
As you can imagine, everyday wolf warrior diplomacy telling people that if you're staying in China, then laugh up your sleeves that the US is what what what kind of country That kind of relations, everyday making that kind of life-and-death emotional battle with the US Now hoping that an American company transfers this vaccine technology to you with our strategy of "market in exchange for technology", do you think this is realistic?! So, in fact, only in a relatively harmonious international environment with a relatively harmonious relationship, only in this case it's possible to make our strategy of "market in exchange for technology" happen Now China is mingling with a rogue country like Russia every day Think about what Russia can give you? Can Russia give you the vaccine technology? Russia's vaccine technology is even not as good as China's So, who are our friends and who are our enemies is the primary issue among vaccines If these problems cannot be solved, then China's anti-epidemic situation would become worrying Why? Let's say a few more words at the end Think about the reason why Western countries and the international community now can open up The very important reason is because the highly effective vaccine has built an effective, protective immune barrier If China only has the inactivated vaccine like Sinovac and considering its relatively poor protection, if China really opens up it may really cause a humanitarian disaster and overwhelming medical resources and then a large number of people cannot get into the hospital The scenes in Wuhan at that time are still vivid in my mind So, the answer to how to obtain an efficient and safe mRNA vaccine is actually the prerequisite for China to open up its doors and resume a normal life It all depends on whether we have a higher political vision whether Chinese leaders have a broader mind to be able to let go of other miscellaneous factors to really take the interests of people as the core to take the goal of ordinary people returning to a normal life as the core Having talked about it for so long, the vaccine is, above all, a political issue Isn't that the case with China's problems? The end to many problems is politics English captions: AVA
2022-10-06