A staff member works during a media tour of a new factory built to produce a COVID-19 coronavirus vaccine at Sinovac, one of 11 Chinese companies approved to carry out clinical trials of potential coronavirus vaccines, in Beijing on September 24, 2020.

The treatment still hasn’t passed final (Stage 3) clinical trials but is already being offered to the public on a first come, first served basis.

An unofficial vaccine rollout is gathering pace despite the warnings of international public health experts.

In September, state-owned SinoPharm revealed that hundreds of thousands of Chinese had already taken its experimental COVID-19 vaccines as part of a state initiative to protect frontline health workers and officials traveling to high-risk nations.

“This is insane,” Adam Kamradt-Scott, associate professor specializing in global health security at the University of Sydney, says of China’s gung-ho vaccine rollout.

We have previous examples of where vaccines that have not gone through sufficient clinical trials have demonstrated adverse reactions with long-term health consequences.”.

Handing out a pre-approval vaccine without sufficient monitoring of efficacy and health of participants risks stoking public misinformation.

What’s more, since COVID-19 cases are so low in China, Stage 3 trials—when the vaccine is given thousands to see how many become infected, compared with volunteers who received a placebo—can only be conducted overseas.

China’s National Health Authority projected China’s COVID-19 vaccine production capacity will reach 610 million doses annually by the end of 2020.

São Paulo Governor João Doria said Brazil’s federal government had also agreed to buy 46 million doses of CoronaVac, one of at least five vaccines undergoing stage 3 trials in the country, which has the world’s third highest infection tally.

“The first results of the clinical study conducted in Brazil prove that among all the vaccines tested in the country, CoronaVac is the safest, the one with the best and most promising rates,” Doria told reporters Monday.