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China’s top drug regulator gave conditional approval to a domestically developed COVID-19 vaccine on Saturday, more than a month after authorizing its first vaccine against the disease.
The manufacturer, Sinovac, based in Beijing, said in a statement that the National Medical Products Administration approved the vaccine based on two months of data from overseas clinical trials. The product, called CoronaVac, has undergone large-scale human testing in countries including Brazil, Turkey, Chile and Indonesia since last summer.
“We have not received the final data, so the effectiveness and safety profile (of the vaccine) need to be further confirmed,” the company said.
Vaccine manufacturers can apply for final approval from the Chinese government after submitting complete data from their trials.
Last month, Brazilian health authorities announced that CoronaVac was 50.38% effective in preventing COVID-19 overall and 100% effective in preventing severe and moderate cases in the country’s trial, which involved more than 12,000 people. The announcement came weeks after Turkey said the vaccine appeared to be more than 91% effective based on a small sample of participants in a large-scale trial.
China’s drug regulator approved the country’s first coronavirus vaccine for commercial use last December. According to the vaccine’s developer, the state company Sinopharm, preliminary results of human trials have shown that it is 79.34% effective in preventing COVID-19.
Neither Sinopharm nor Sinovac have published detailed data from their trials.
The companies’ vaccines were cleared for emergency use in July. Since December, Chinese cities have launched large-scale vaccination programs, targeting workers most at risk of infection, such as healthcare personnel, taxi drivers, and cold chain logistics personnel.
As of Wednesday, China had administered 31 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccines, Mi Feng, a spokesman for the National Health Commission, said during a press conference on Thursday.
Publisher: Bibek Bhandari.
(Header image: A worker checks samples of Sinovac’s COVID-19 vaccine on a production line in Beijing, on September 24, 2020. People Visual)
