BEIJING (Reuters) – Sinovac Biotech Ltd’s corona virus vaccine candidate CoronaVac was approved for emergency use in July as part of a program in China to vaccinate high-risk groups, such as medical staff, said a person familiar with the matter .
China National Biotec Group (CNBG), a unit of pharmaceutical giant China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm), also said it had received emergency use approval for a candidate for coronavirus vaccine on social media platform WeChat on Sunday.
CNBG, which has two vaccine candidates in phase 3 clinical trials, did not say which of its vaccines had been cleared for emergency use.
China has provided experimental coronavirus vaccines to high-risk groups since July, and a health official told state media in an interview released last week that authorities might consider extending the emergency use program to try for possible outbreaks. to avoid the fall and winter.
Officially, China has given small details about which vaccine candidates have been given to high-risk people under the emergency use program and how many people have been vaccinated.
State media reported in June, prior to the emergency use program, that employees of state-owned companies traveling abroad were allowed to take one of the two faxes developed by CNBG, while the Chinese military also used the vaccine candidate approved by CanSino Biologics.
Seven coronavirus vaccines are in final stages of testing around the world, and four of them are from China.
But no vaccine has yet passed the final stage of trials proving it is safe and effective – conditions that normally need to be met in order to obtain regulatory approval for mass use. COVID-19 has killed more than 800,000 people worldwide.
(Report by Roxanne Liu in Beijing and Miyoung Kim in Singapore; Edited by Ana Nicolaci da Costa)
