Last checked at 
* Turkey says it vaccinates more than 200,000 people on
first day
* Hungary looking at Chinese vaccine, says EU orders too
slow
* Brazil expected to launch programme next week
By Murad Sezer and Peter Graff
ISTANBUL/LONDON, Jan 14 (Reuters) - China is stealing a
march on Western drugmakers in the COVID-19 vaccine race in
developing nations, with Indonesia and Turkey rolling out huge
campaigns with a Chinese shot this week, Brazil due to follow
soon, and even EU member Hungary signing up.
Scientists in some Western countries say China has been too
slow to publish trial data. Public reports so far about how well
its vaccines work have been inconsistent, which the Chinese
firms attribute to variations in methodology.
Still, countries with hundreds of millions of people
desperate for a vaccine think China's shots are good enough.
As Western drugmakers struggle to meet demand at home,
Beijing has sent millions of doses round the world of CoronaVac,
made by Sinovac Biotech, and is also marketing a
separate vaccine made by another company, Sinopharm.
The exports come even as China battles its own flare-up in
infections, which has put more than 28 million people in
lockdown. China has administered 10 million vaccine doses at
home.
Though some studies on the Sinovac shot have reported lower
effectiveness rates than some Western products, the countries
buying them say they appear effective at preventing the most
serious, deadly form of COVID-19.
Perhaps most importantly, they are also easy to administer,
allowing the quick launch of large-scale programmes to save
lives and prevent health systems from being overwhelmed.
Turkey launched its programme on Thursday with the Sinovac
shot, and by late afternoon said it had already vaccinated more
than 200,000 people - more in a few hours than France has
managed in three weeks. Health workers went first.
"We spent around 10 months in white overalls, supporting
people as they struggle for life. Health workers know very well
that this situation cannot be taken lightly and that the vaccine
is needed," Surgeon General Nurettin Yiyit said.
Hungary, which has complained about the "scandalously" slow
rollout of vaccines bought by the European Union on behalf of
its 27 member states, reached a deal on Thursday to buy the
Sinopharm vaccine. If approved, it would become the first EU
country to authorise a Chinese vaccine.
'BREAK THE CHAIN'
While all countries are likely to need more than one type of
vaccine to meet demand, China has been quick off the mark in
shipping doses to countries at the back of the queue for
supplies of Western shots.
Many developing countries may still have months to wait for
their first vaccines.
Meanwhile, Turkey already has 3 million doses of the Sinovac
vaccine in its stocks, and Brazil has 6 million doses. Brazil is
expected to begin injecting them next week.
Indonesia's President Joko Widodo was the first to get a
shot of the Sinovac vaccine to kick off one of the world's
biggest vaccine programmes on Wednesday. It expects to have 30
million Sinovac doses by the end of March out of an order of
more than 122 million in 2022.
"Vaccination is important to break the chain of COVID-19
transmission and give protection to us and safety to every
Indonesian and help accelerate economic recovery," the president
said.
The Western company competing most directly in developing
countries with Sinovac so far is AstraZeneca, whose
vaccine developed with Oxford University is also cheap and easy
to deliver.
It will be the basis of the biggest vaccine programme of
them all, which India is expected to launch on Saturday. More
than 5 million doses were flown across the country this week in
preparation.
India's government says it will pay less than $3 a dose for
the first 100 million shots, produced under license by India's
Serum Institute.
Russia will launch a new, scaled-up version of its
vaccination programme next week, using its own Sputnik V shot,
which it is also heavily marketing in developing countries. It
has won approval in Argentina, Belarus and Serbia, although so
far it has been slow to produce doses for export at a big scale.
Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund
which backs the vaccine, said in an interview at the Reuters
NEXT conference that Russia would seek EU approval for the
vaccine next month and expects to win 25% of global market
share.
(Reporting by Murad Sezer, Mehmet Emin Caliskan and Ali
Kucukgocmen in Istanbul, Tuvan Gumrukcu in Ankara, Gabriel
Stargardter and Ricardo Brito in Rio de Janeiro, Stanley
Widianto in Jakarta, Aditi Shah and Sachin Ravikumar in India,
Andrew Osborn and Polina Ivanova in Moscow, Krisztina Than and
Anita Komuves in Budapest;
Editing by Josephine Mason and Andrew Cawthorne)
