China’s CanSinoBIO finds no cases of blood clots from its Covid vaccine despite similarities with AstraZeneca, J&J

Chinese vaccine maker CanSinoBIO said it found no cases of blood clots in people who received its vaccine, as similar jabs from AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson face scrutiny over the possible side effect.

The Global Times newspaper quoted the Tianjin-based pharmaceutical company as saying that it had not received any reports of blood clots in people who were inoculated with CanSinoBIO’s Covid-19 vaccine.

The AD5-nCOV vaccine, also known as Convidecia, uses the adenovirus type-5 – a harmless cold virus – as a vector to deliver instructions for human cells to produce part of the coronavirus that can trigger the immune system to recognize and attack the actual virus. Vaccines developed by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson (J&J) have the same mechanism but use different adenoviruses – a chimpanzee adenovirus and adenovirus type-26 respectively.

CanSinoBIO’s vaccine has so far been approved in China, Pakistan, Chile, and Hungary. 

Several European countries briefly suspended the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine last month after reports linked it to fatal cases of blood clots. The EU’s drug regulator, the European Medicines Agency, recently concluded that blood clots are very rare side effects of the vaccine, but appear too infrequently to discard its use in national immunization campaigns. 

The use of the J&J vaccine was suspended in the US and South Africa this week after blood clots were discovered in six recipients in the US, one of which died. The company said that the dangerous condition was found in an extremely small number of people who received the vaccine – six cases from among more than 6.8 million administered doses – but it decided to delay its rollout in Europe until a review is completed.

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