Beijing, Dec 31: China has granted conditional approval to the country’s first homegrown COVID-19 vaccine developed by state-owned pharmaceutical giant Sinopharm, an official announcement said on Thursday.
The approval comes a day after Sinopharm said its vaccine showed 79.34 per cent efficacy and a 99.52 per cent antibody-positive conversion rate in the interim results of the Phase III clinical trials.
“The inactivated vaccine, developed by Beijing Biological Products Institute under Sinopharm’s subsidiary China National Biotec Group (CNBG), got official authorisation from China’s National Medical Products Administration on Wednesday,” Chen Shifei, deputy head of the National Medical Products Administration, was quoted as saying by the state-run Global Times.
The Sinopharm’s vaccine results are better than the 50 per cent standard of the World Health Organization (WHO) and Chinese authorities, the report said, adding that the vaccine also showed a good safety level. China’s National Medical Products Administration’s drug registration bureau said earlier that a total of 11 Chinese vaccine candidates are in different stages of testing at home and abroad. Beijing Biological Products Institute Co, a Sinopharm subsidiary, said in a statement on Wednesday that interim results show the Sinopharm vaccine is safe and people who received two doses produced high-level antibodies.
The announcement of China’s approval for one of its vaccines came after the US authorised Pfizer and Moderna jabs. Britain has approved the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine for use in the UK, with the first doses due to be given on Monday.
Russia too has approved its vaccine Sputnik-V. Both Moderna’s and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine have shown similar efficacy levels of nearly 95 per cent, which the official media here said was beyond predictions and drove up the public’s expectation for Chinese inactivated vaccines.
The CNBG chairman Yang Xiaoming told the Global Times earlier a vaccine has to undergo strict review by each country’s national drug administration before being authorised for public use.
All data and processes are reviewed by professional third-party committees, Yang was inoculated with a CNBG vaccine in March along with hundreds of his colleagues, the report said. He said they had tested the level of antibodies six months after vaccination and the results were good. (PTI)
