By The Associated Press
Chinese health authorities said Thursday that they have given conditional authorization to a coronavirus vaccine developed by the state laboratory Sinopharm.
It is the first vaccine approved for general use in China.
The authorization was issued at a time when the country is already carrying out a
vaccination campaign of 50 million people
before the important celebration of the Lunar New Year in February.
Chen Shifei, deputy commissioner of the China National Medical Products Administration, told a news conference on Thursday that the decision to approve the vaccine was made the day before.
The vaccine was developed by the Beijing Institute of Biological Products, a subsidiary of the state conglomerate Sinopharm.
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The company announced Wednesday that, according to preliminary information from the last stage of testing, the vaccine is 79.3% effective.
Definitive proof of its effectiveness
will depend on more data being published
.
Sinopharm is one of at least five Chinese developers competing globally to create vaccines against the disease that has killed
more than 1.8 million people around the world
.
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The conditional authorization means that investigations continue, and that authorities can request more information about the safety and effectiveness for certain populations with different health profiles, said Tao Lina, a former government immunologist.
The term generally means that a drug or product in question
might be restricted to certain age groups
, he noted.
Authorities declined to mention a particular price
.
"Of course it will be at the limit of what a person can pay," said Zheng Zhongwei, an official with the National Health Commission.
The Beijing Institute's vaccine is already being manufactured on a large scale, although the authorities did not respond to questions about current production capacity.
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"Production capacity is a dynamic and continuous process," said Mao Junfeng, deputy director of the Department of Consumer Products Industry at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
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Sinopharm's vaccine has already been approved in the
United Arab Emirates and Bahrain
, and is scheduled for upcoming use in Morocco.
Mexico
, for its part, has already closed an agreement to acquire millions of doses of another Chinese vaccine, that of the CanSino company, which has not yet been approved.
Other countries, such as
Turkey, Indonesia and Brazil
, have been buying doses of another Chinese candidate vaccine, made by Sinovac Biotech.
The New York Times reported that Sinopharm's announcement Thursday about its vaccine did not provide a breakdown of the results and left many questions unanswered.
This, according to the New York newspaper, adds to the
scarcity of clear information about the vaccination policy of China
, where immunization programs against COVID-19 have already been launched before the authorization of the vaccines.
With information from The New York Times and EFE.
