TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is publishing a study demonstrating that Taiwan's locally-developed Medigen COVID vaccine has a high degree of efficacy, comparable to mRNA vaccines.
The CDC's journal Emerging Infections Diseases has accepted a study by Taiwanese scientists into the efficacy of the Medigen COVID vaccine (MVC-COV1901) and will publish the full findings in its March issue. An early release is already online presenting an overview of the study.
According to the study's abstract, after analyzing the vaccine effectiveness (VE) against severe and fatal outcomes post-infection through the administration of three doses of vaccines (two primary and one booster), researchers found that BNT has a VE of 95.8%, Medigen 91.0%, Moderna 81.8%, and AstraZeneca 65.7%. The study's authors concluded that protein subunit vaccines such as Medigen "provide similar protection against SARS-CoV-2–associated hospitalization as mRNA vaccines," confirming the efficacy of Taiwan's domestically produced jab.
This study, conducted by a team from the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control, focused on the domestic outbreak of the Omicron variant in 2022 and examined vaccination records for over 23 million individuals. The study used internationally accepted big data statistical analysis to assess the "real-world" efficacy of the vaccines in the study.
The study confirmed that the protective efficacy of receiving three doses of the COVID vaccines is higher. Additionally, it found that mRNA vaccines such as Moderna and BNT, as well as the protein subunit vaccine Medigen, have better and longer-lasting protective efficacy compared to the adenovirus vaccine AstraZeneca, with BNT and Medigen demonstrating protective efficacy of over 90% in preventing moderate to severe illnesses.
Taiwan CDC Deputy Director-General Lo Yi-chun (羅一鈞)\, was cited by Liberty Times as saying that this is also the first international comparison using real-world big data to evaluate mRNA, protein subunit, and adenovirus vector vaccines. Lo said the results confirm that Taiwan's domestically-produced protein subunit vaccine shows comparable effectiveness to mRNA vaccines in protecting against severe illness and death caused by the Omicron variant.
Early release of study on Medigen's efficacy. (CDC screenshot)