[ad_1]
The Chinese authorities today gave the green light for the commercialization of one of the covid-19 vaccines developed in the country, by Sinopharm and the Beijing Institute of Biological Products subsidiary.
Both companies asked the Chinese regulatory authority for approval of the vaccine on Wednesday, after reporting that the effectiveness is 79.34%, according to provisional data from phase 3 clinical trials.
At a press conference in Beijing today, regulator number two, Chen Shifei, explained that the institution concluded that “the known and potential benefits of this vaccine outweigh the known and potential risks” and that it meets the established standards for conditional approval. of marketing.
The condition is that Sinopharm continues to conduct clinical trials in accordance with the agreed deadlines and send the collected data to the country’s medical authorities for verification and final registration.
Chen explained that, according to local laws, a vaccine can be conditionally approved when it is “urgently needed to respond to major public health emergencies.”
In Wednesday’s brief announcement about the Phase 3 test results, no data such as the number of participants contracted the virus or reported side effects were provided.
These data were also not released at today’s press conference, having promised that they will be published “later in Chinese medical journals and others,” according to officials responsible for the production of vaccines and who guarantee that the tests were carried out “with standards. “. exceed existing ones, including those of the WHO [Organização Mundial de Saúde]”.
Several of the vaccine candidates developed in the country were approved in June for use in emergencies, that is, in people at high risk of infection.
The deputy director of the National Health Commission, Zeng Yixin, revealed that since then until November, more than 1.5 million doses of vaccines have been administered.
On December 15, China launched a more ambitious campaign to vaccinate at-risk groups, and three million more doses have been injected since then.
The covid-19 pandemic caused at least 1,791,033 deaths as a result of more than 81.9 million cases of infection worldwide, according to a report by the France-Presse (AFP) news agency.
The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected at the end of December 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
[ad_2]
