The World Health Organization has released a coronavirus vaccine from the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac for an emergency, the agency said on Tuesday.
The decision, made about a month after the agency approved another Chinese emergency vaccine from Sinopharm, means that Sinovac’s vaccine may be included in Covax, a worldwide initiative to deliver coronavirus vaccines to countries low income.
There is an urgent need for vaccines in countries and regions where the virus is increasing, such as India, much of Southeast Asia, and South America. Adding another vaccine to the distributional calculus could help meet that demand.
Sinovac’s vaccine, called CoronaVac, was developed using inactivated viruses, a technique that has been used for over a century.
Clinical trials with CoronaVac in Brazil and Turkey produced very different results, but both showed that the vaccine protected against Covid-19.
According to Oxford University’s Our World in Data project, the vaccine is already approved in 29 countries, including China, Brazil and Mexico.
CoronaVac is given in two doses over two to four weeks and is easier to store than those from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which must be frozen for long-term storage.
The WHO Director General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference on Tuesday that CoronaVac’s easy storage makes it very useful for the “resource poor environments” that need it most.
So far, an overwhelming proportion of vaccine doses have gone to affluent countries, and many of them are returning to an approach to normal life as the virus ravages less affluent countries.
“The world desperately needs multiple Covid-19 vaccines to eradicate the huge inequality of access around the world,” said Dr. Mariângela Simão, WHO Deputy Director General for Access to Health Products, in a statement.
At the press conference on Tuesday, Dr. Tedros and officials from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank Group and World Trade Organization launched a new push to secure $ 50 billion to boost the manufacture and distribution of coronavirus vaccines and other medical supplies and treatments to poorer countries.
“An increasingly two-pronged pandemic is causing a two-pronged economic recovery with negative repercussions for all countries,” said Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the IMF on Effective Way to Boost Global Production. In other words, vaccination policy is economic policy. “
