Neelika says her tweet has been misconstrued to run down Sinopharm vaccine

By Rathindra Kuruwita

Purposefully misquoting or misinterpreting information to discourage people from taking vaccines was immoral and unethical, given that a large number of unvaccinated Sri Lankans were dying, Prof. Neelika Malavige of the Department of Immunology and Molecular Medicine, University of Sri Jayewardenepura told The Island yesterday.

Prof. Malavige said that she had shared a preprint titled ‘Morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 post-vaccination breakthrough infections in association with vaccines and the emergence of variants in Bahrain’ which is the first study to compare the efficacy of four different vaccines.

The study showed that Sinopharm was slightly less effective than Pfizer on older people in Bahrain, she said. However, death among unvaccinated people under 50 were 8.1-fold higher compared to Sinopharm vaccine recipients. The percentage of deaths among all COVID-19 cases in unvaccinated people over 50 years of age was 3.8-fold higher compared to the Sinopharm, Prof. Malavige said.

However, within a few hours a website had taken the tweets that accompanied the study out of context to discourage people from taking Sinopharm and that was very wrong, she said.

“It is very sad that my twitter posts are taken out of context to create doubt about the efficacy of vaccines. When all evidence show that all vaccines, significantly reduce severe disease and death. The best one is the first one you can take,” she said.