Tag: Turkey

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Wildfires in Turkey Rage on, Firefighters Battle to Comprise the Blaze

Wildfires in Turkey Rage on, Firefighters Struggle to Contain the Blaze

Firefighters in Turkey fought for a fourth day on Saturday to contain dozens of forest fires as rapidly spreading fires forced the evacuation of popular resorts and dozens of rural areas along the Mediterranean coast.

The fires, which authorities say may have been caused by arson or human negligence, killed at least six people and injured about 200 others on Saturday, officials said.

When tourists were forced to flee hotels, some on boats, as the flames drew closer, rural residents watched the fires burn down their homes, kill their livestock and destroy their businesses.

“Our lungs burn, our future burns,” said Muhittin Bocek, the mayor of Antalya, a holiday town, in a telephone interview from the devastated city of Manavgat, about 80 kilometers east of the coast.

The flames are part of a broader pattern of forest fires ravaging the Mediterranean this summer, with areas in Lebanon, Syria, Greece, Italy and Cyprus also battling fast-paced fires.

They’re also the latest in a string of extreme weather events around the world – from deadly floods in Europe and China to raging fires in the United States, Canada, and Siberia – that scientists believe may be related to climate change due to global changes Are associated with warming.

Cagatay Tavsanoglu, a biology professor specializing in fire ecology at Hacettepe University in Ankara, said fires in the Mediterranean area happen annually, but the magnitude of the fires that year should serve as a warning.

“Many fires could not be extinguished and under the influence of dry winds they burned too quickly,” said Tavsanoglu. “These are just the first signs of what climate change would do to the Mediterranean in the future.”

For models showing a global temperature increase of three degrees Celsius (or an additional 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), the upper end of the forecast, the average area burning in southern Europe would double each year, according to a research paper published in 2018 in Nature was published.

And even if the warming stays below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the goal of the Paris Climate Agreement, 40 percent more land could burn, the researchers warned.

Cyprus suffered some of the worst fires in decades this summer, killing at least four people. Authorities in Greece this week evacuated areas north of Athens as forest fires threatened homes near the capital. And in Italy, the island of Sardinia experienced “an unprecedented disaster” this month, the region’s authorities said.

In Lebanon, where the state has basically ceased to function and the authorities took little action this summer to avoid the fires, a teenager died this week as the fires spread to the north of the country and Syria.

Extreme weather

Updated

July 30, 2021, 9:35 p.m. ET

In the Akkar district, videos shared online showed dystopian scenes of the fires that spread through the woods on Wednesday. Firefighters, the Lebanese military, civil protection officials and volunteers have worked to contain them.

The fires worsened the suffering of many people in Lebanon, who live with daily shortages of fuel and medicine, countless power outages and the aftermath of an unprecedented financial crisis.

More than 100 communities are exposed to a high risk of forest fire, said the Lebanese agricultural research institute this week.

In Turkey, the fires broke out on Wednesday in Manavgat, a city in the southern province of Antalya. As of Friday, there were fires in more than 70 other locations across the country, said the Turkish Forestry Directorate.

Some of the fires were brought under control, but three people died in Manavgat and a fourth in Marmaris, another popular resort.

The fires also spread to the resort of Bodrum, where at least two hotels were evacuated.

The Turkish authorities are still investigating the cause of the fires, but on Thursday the government’s communications director Fahrettin Altun called them an “attack”.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said police and intelligence officers were investigating arson allegations. “You can’t dismiss that,” Erdogan said to reporters in Istanbul on Friday. “Because it is almost at the same time, in different places.”

Turkey has used around 4,000 firefighters, hundreds of vehicles and three aircraft to fight fires, according to Agriculture Minister Bekir Pakdemirli.

However, for some local residents, the response has been slow and inadequate.

“Does the Turkish Republic only have three planes?” A Manavgat resident yelled at Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu when he visited the city on Thursday evening.

Mr. Cavusoglu spoke against a backdrop of gorgeous scenery, and earlier in the day televisions showed entire districts left empty and smoking, full of charred houses under orange skies.

Mr. Bocek, the mayor of Antalya, said every fourth neighborhood in Manavgat must be evacuated.

In a community that is heavily dependent on agriculture and ranching, most residents are still not allowed to return home because the fires are not under control.

According to Turkish media reports, a crowd attacked two people under high tension on Thursday, accusing them of starting the fires. When the military police stepped in to protect the two, a mob tried to bring them back to no avail.

While in some places the anger boiled, in others there had been no time to ponder who should be to blame.

“When the flames came over us, we could only save the cow,” said Nuray Canbolat, a resident of Kozan district in southern Adana province, in a television interview with the state news agency Anadolu. “We just saved our lives.”

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Business

Turkey and China disrupt the multibillion-dollar armed drone market

Turkey and China disrupt the multibillion-dollar armed drone market

The widespread use of drones in Iraq and Afghanistan by the United States to combat and kill insurgents opened a new chapter in the history of the conflict. These soaring and remote-controlled aircraft were able to attack targets with impunity while operators worked safely in a ground control station.

To keep the crews out of danger, the drones were also politically cheap to use over dangerous skies. Now more and more countries like China and Turkey are gaining this military capability for their own ends.

“At the moment we have seen over 100 countries around the world that have used military drones, and that number is growing significantly,” said Wim Zwijnenburg, project manager for humanitarian disarmament at the Dutch peace organization PAX. “We have over 20 states that use armed drones in or outside of armed conflict.”

Although larger and more complex drones like the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper are more powerful, they are not cheap to develop or operate, which is why smaller drones are becoming more ubiquitous in conflict areas.

Limiting the proliferation of these smaller drones and the ability to arm them is a government nightmare for government agencies around the world.

“Drones are just model airplanes with great sensors. All of these airplanes have a dual purpose and have been used in the civilian sector,” said Ulrike Franke, Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “In fact, drones have grown enormously in the civilian population in the last five to ten years, so it’s really difficult to control their export.”

Check out the video above to find out why the multibillion dollar armed drone market is in demand beyond the US.

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Health

Turkey goes into first full lockdown as third-wave Covid instances surge

Turkey goes into first full lockdown as third-wave Covid cases surge

People are shopping in the Egyptian bazaar and around Eminonu before a full lockdown from Thursday evening through May 17 to contain the spread of the coronavirus in Istanbul, Turkey on April 29, 2021.

Ezra Bilgin | Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Turkey will be completely in lockdown for three weeks starting Thursday as a third wave of coronavirus cases hit the country’s health system.

The 82-million country had by then managed to avoid a full lockdown and impose a series of partial restrictions that brought the average daily caseload to 6,000 by February. However, a loosening of these restrictions in March sparked a new wave of infections that gave Turkey the highest daily case rate in Europe, reaching more than 60,000 registered cases per day by the end of April.

The government is asking all businesses to shut down, unless the Home Office grants an exception, to ban intercity travel without a permit, and to relocate all schooling online. Supermarkets can remain open except on Sundays.

Turkey has reported more than 4.7 million cases of the virus and over 39,000 deaths since the pandemic began. That’s a relatively low 0.8% death rate, which official figures say is due to the country’s strong health system.

However, as the new surge continues to spread, residents fear the economic impact of the lockdown on a population already affected by high inflation, rising unemployment and a dramatically weakened currency.

The lockdown will “destroy the people who want to make money for their loved ones as the economy was badly hit even before the corona,” Eyal, an Istanbul tourist who works in the tourism industry, told CNBC.

“As a person in the tourism sector, we also have problems with the government’s poorly managed corona situation as after (the announcement of the lockdown) the few reservations we had were canceled,” Eyal said, withholding his last name for fear of government reprisals .

The Turkish Ministry of Health did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, tourism accounts for 7.7% of Turkish employment. Record sales were achieved in tourism in 2019 before falling a whopping 72% in the first eleven months of 2020, Reuters reported in November.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday that without stricter restrictions and slowed down infection rates, a “high price” would be paid for tourism, education and trade. He wants to reduce the daily infections to 5,000. According to the Johns Hopkins University, the daily recorded cases as of Wednesday were 40,444.

“More and more unemployed”

The bus stops in Istanbul were full of travelers trying to get out of the city before the lockdown. Many Turks fear that this could only make the situation worse.

“This curfew might be the only solution to lessen the new cases, but almost all of the people who have the money didn’t want to stay in Istanbul,” he said, describing an exodus to other parts of the country that he fears Increase the new falls instead of decreasing them. “

Erdogan has also come under fire for hosting overcrowded events, like a massive gathering for his political party’s congress in late March, which packed thousands of people into a 10,400-capacity sports complex to obey the socially distant rules to withdraw from Turkey.

“I’m just as scared as I was watching the big indoor government gatherings for no reason,” Eyal said. “There’s a little bit of government support, almost nothing, and there are more and more unemployed and I’m worried about them.”

The Turkish Presidency Office did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

“Bad Execution” and Prohibition of Alcohol

“It’s not the lockdown itself that is frustrating, but the poor execution,” a European expat living in Istanbul told CNBC anonymously over concerns about government reprisals.

“Whenever the number of cases seems to be going down, the restrictions are being lifted prematurely, which happened not so long ago. The number of cases ended up being below 5,000 and all bars and restaurants were up and running, which is the biggest increase we’ve had . ” ,” he said.

Another government policy has rubbed off many Turks and residents: a ban on alcohol sales from April 29th to May 17th.

ISTANBUL, TURKEY – APRIL 29: People are waiting in a queue in the Cevizlibag district to board metro buses and trams to return their homes before the full lockdown Thursday evening through May 17 to stop the spread of coronavirus in Istanbul, Turkey on May 29 Curb April, 2021 (Photo by Isa Terli / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Anadolu Agency | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

“Probably the furthest thing is the ban on alcohol,” said the expat resident, adding, “This has caused outrage among secular Turks, saying that the government has no right to deal with any person and what they drink at home , too busy. “”

Earlier this week, #alkolumedokunma – meaning “don’t touch my alcohol” – was the most popular hashtag on Turkish Twitter as secular politicians criticized the government’s move to impose religious values ​​on the country’s people.

Light at the end of the tunnel?

The lockdown “comes at a bad time for Turkey,” said Agathe Demarais, global forecasting director at the Economist Intelligence Unit. Inflation in Turkey is 15%, youth unemployment is 25% and the Turkish lira has hit record lows against the dollar in recent months.

“The new measures will further reduce confidence and increase uncertainty, which will weigh on economic growth this year,” said Demarais.

Still, she noted, “There is light at the end of the tunnel on the coronavirus front: Turkey’s vaccination program is proceeding rapidly and the government should be able to lift restrictions later this year, possibly before the crucial summer season for tourism. “

The EIU estimates that Turkey vaccinated the majority of its adult population in the first half of 2022, which would place it in the same category as Canada, Australia or South Korea.

Categories
Business

Second Cryptocurrency Platform in Turkey Shuts Down: Dwell Updates

Outside a cryptocurrency exchange in Istanbul. Dozens of online cryptocurrency trading platforms have sprung up in Turkey in recent years, and the business is little regulated.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Chris Mcgrath/Getty Images

Turkish authorities arrested four employees of a cryptocurrency trading platform on suspicion of fraud after customer accounts were frozen, authorities said, the second collapse of a digital currency firm in Turkey within a week.

The collapse of Vebitcoin, one of dozens of cryptocurrency trading platforms that have sprung up in Turkey in recent years, came after the Thodex trading platform shut down last week, more than 60 of its employees were arrested, and its chief executive left the country.

Vebitcoin was a relatively small operation and the losses from it are unlikely to be big, said Turan Sert, who advises BlockchainIST, a cryptocurrency research center affiliated with Bahcesehir University in Istanbul.

Ilker Bas, the chief executive of Vebitcoin, told police after his arrest that the platform has 90,000 registered users and had a trading volume of 600 million lira to 800 million lira, or $72 million to $96 million, per month, the private news agency Demiroren reported. Customer losses are probably much smaller, because the same assets are typically traded repeatedly during the course of a month.

“Due to the recent developments in the crypto money industry, our transactions have become much more intense than expected,” Vebitcoin said on its website. “We have decided to cease our activities in order to fulfill all regulations and claims.”

Cryptocurrency trading is little regulated in Turkey, and the number of platforms has proliferated because of the relatively low cost of setting up. Off-the-shelf trading software costs around $100,000, said Mr. Sert, who also advises Paribu, one of the largest cryptocurrency trading platforms.

Mr. Sert estimated that there were more than 90 platforms, mostly “very small mom-and-pop shops.”

The phenomenon is by no means limited to Turkey. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Dogecoin have attracted the attention of serious investors and become a hot topic on Wall Street. Coinbase, a U.S.-based cryptocurrency trading platform, sold shares to the public for the first time this month and is valued by the stock market at $58 billion. Regulators in the United States and other countries have struggled to keep up with the fast growth of digital money.

The Turkish Central Bank barred the use of cryptocurrencies for purchases this month, citing their riskiness and popularity with criminals, and signaled that more regulation of the sector is coming. The prospect of greater scrutiny could be prompting some platforms to shut down, Mr. Sert said.

Customers of Thodex may have lost $2 billion, a lawyer for the firm’s clients said last week, but Mr. Sert said that figure probably referred to the site’s trading volume and greatly overstated the potential losses. Many platforms exaggerate their trading volume to attract customers, he said.

The total losses to cryptocurrency investors, while devastating to some individuals, are not large enough to push Turkey’s already shaky economy into crisis, Mr. Sert said.

“I don’t think this will create any instability in the system,” he said.

The gap between executive compensation and average worker pay has been growing for decades. Chief executives of big companies now make, on average, 320 times as much as their typical worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In 1989, that ratio was 61 to 1.

The pandemic compounded these disparities, as hundreds of companies awarded their leaders pay packages worth significantly more than most Americans will make in their entire lives, David Gelles reports for The New York Times.

In the course of his reporting, corporate public relations teams employed various tactics to justify their bosses’ big paydays:

  • A Hilton spokesman stressed that the figure in its latest proxy filing did not represent take-home pay for Chris Nassetta, because the company restructured several stock awards. “Said directly, Chris did not take home $55.9 million in 2020,” the spokesman said. “Chris’s actual pay was closer to $20.1 million.” Hilton lost $720 million last year.

  • Boeing wanted to make clear how much money Dave Calhoun “voluntarily elected to forgo to support the company through the Covid-19 pandemic” — some $3.6 million, according to a spokesman. Nonetheless, Mr. Calhoun was awarded $21.1 million last year, while Boeing lost $12 billion.

  • Starbucks, which awarded Kevin Johnson $14.7 million, was among many companies making the case that their chief executive was essential to future success. “Continuity in Kevin’s role is particularly vital to Starbucks at this time,” said Mary Dillon, a member of the compensation committee. The company made a $930 million profit in its latest fiscal year, down three-quarters from the previous year.

Technical glitches marred the Small Business Association’s first attempt at accepting applications for the grant program.Credit…Zack Wittman for The New York Times

Music club operators, theater owners and others in the live-event market have been waiting nearly four months for a $16 billion federal grant fund for their industry to start taking applications. Their hopes were briefly raised two weeks ago when the program’s application website opened, then dashed as a technical malfunction prevented the site from accepting any applications.

Now, the Small Business Administration, the federal agency that runs the program, plans to try again on Monday at noon — but only after one last round of confusion and frustration.

Late Thursday, the agency announced that it would reopen its application system for the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant on Saturday. After heavy pushback from angry applicants — especially Jewish business owners who do not use electronics on Saturdays in observation of the Sabbath — the agency changed course Friday night and rescheduled the reopening for Monday.

“We understand the challenges a weekend opening would bring, and to ensure the greatest number of businesses can apply for these funds, we decided to reschedule,” the agency said in a statement. “We remain committed to delivering economic aid to this hard-hit sector quickly and efficiently.”

The money will be awarded on a first-come-first-served basis and is widely expected to run out fast. That means many applicants will feel pressure to submit paperwork as soon as the application system opens — even if it is at an inconvenient time.

Applicants were generally relieved by the shift to Monday, but annoyed by the whiplash.

“It’s been a mess on so many levels. I feel like they’re torturing us,” said Dani Zoldan, the owner of Stand Up NY, a comedy club in Manhattan. Mr. Zoldan is Jewish and had been vocal on Twitter about the obstacles of a Saturday start.

The National Independent Venue Association, an industry group that lobbied for the relief fund, said it endorsed the decision to postpone the start.

“While we’re all anxious to apply as soon as possible, we support the S.B.A.’s decision to reopen the portal Monday and encourage a fair and equitable process for all,” said Audrey Fix Schaefer, a spokeswoman for the group. “The S.B.A. has responded to our desperate need and we’re grateful for that.”

The Small Business Administration is also preparing to open a second grant program, the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, which is a $28.6 billion support fund for bars, restaurants and food trucks. That program is planning a seven-day test to help the agency avoid the kind of technical problems that plagued the venue program.

A Meituan delivery worker in Shanghai. Last year the firm made more than 27 million food-delivery transactions per day.Credit…Aly Song/Reuters

China’s fast-moving campaign to rein in its internet giants is continuing apace with an antitrust investigation into Meituan, a leading food-delivery app.

The investigation, which the country’s market regulator announced with a terse, one-line statement on Monday, focuses on reports that the company blocked restaurants and other merchants on its platform from selling on rival food-delivery sites.

Earlier this month, the regulator imposed a record $2.8 billion fine on the e-commerce titan Alibaba for exclusivity requirements of this sort. In a statement on Chinese social media, Meituan said that it would cooperate with the authorities and that its operations were continuing as usual.

Meituan is a powerhouse in China. It made more than 27 million food-delivery transactions a day last year and reported around $18 billion in revenue, making it larger than Uber by sales. Meituan’s main rival in takeout delivery in China is Ele.me, a service owned by Alibaba.

Alibaba has been an early major target in China’s efforts to curb what officials describe as unfair competitive practices in the internet industry. But Beijing has made clear that it will be keeping a much closer eye on all of the sector’s biggest and richest companies.

Meituan was one of 34 Chinese internet firms that were summoned to meet with the antitrust authority this month. The following day, the regulator began publishing on its website statements from the companies, Meituan included, in which they vowed to obey laws and regulations.

Bodies awaiting cremation on Friday in East Delhi.Credit…Atul Loke for The New York Times

NEW DELHI — With a devastating second wave of Covid-19 sweeping across India and lifesaving supplemental oxygen in short supply, India’s government on Sunday said it had ordered Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to take down dozens of social media posts critical of its handling of the pandemic.

The order was aimed at roughly 100 posts that included critiques from opposition politicians and calls for Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, to resign. The government said that the posts could incite panic, used images out of context and could hinder its response to the pandemic.

The companies complied with the requests for now, in part by making the posts invisible to those using the sites inside India. In the past, the companies have reposted some content after determining that it didn’t break the law.

The takedown orders come as India’s public health crisis spirals into a political one, and set the stage for a widening struggle between American social media platforms and Mr. Modi’s government over who decides what can be said online.

On Monday, the country reported almost 353,000 new infections and 2,812 deaths, marking the fifth consecutive day it set a world record in daily infection statistics, though experts warn that the true numbers are probably much higher. The country now accounts for almost half of all new cases globally. Its health system appears to be teetering. Hospitals across the country have scrambled to get enough oxygen for patients.

In New Delhi, the capital, hospitals this weekend turned away patients after running out of oxygen and beds. Last week, at least 22 patients were killed in a hospital in the city of Nashik, after a leak cut off their oxygen supplies.

Online photos of bodies on plywood hospital beds and the countless fires of overworked crematories have gone viral. Desperate patients and their families have pleaded online for help from the government, horrifying an international audience.

Mr. Modi has been under attack for ignoring the advice of experts about the risks of loosening restrictions, after he held large political rallies with little regard for social distancing. Some of the content now offline in India highlighted that contradiction, using lurid images to contrast Mr. Modi’s rallies with the flames of funeral pyres.

People waiting to get vaccinated in New Orleans this month.Credit…Emily Kask for The New York Times

More than five million Americans, or nearly 8 percent of those who got a first shot of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, have missed their second doses, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is more than double the rate among people who got inoculated in the first several weeks of the nationwide vaccination campaign.

Even as the country wrestles with the problem of millions of people who are wary about getting vaccinated at all, local health officials are confronting a new challenge of ensuring that those who do get inoculated are doing so fully, Rebecca Robbins reports for The New York Times.

The reasons that people are missing their second shots vary. In interviews, some said they feared the side effects, including flulike symptoms, which were more common and stronger after the second dose. Others said they felt that they were sufficiently protected with a single shot.

Those attitudes were expected, but another hurdle has been surprisingly prevalent. A number of vaccine providers have canceled second-dose appointments because they ran out of supply or didn’t have the right brand in stock.

Walgreens, one of the biggest vaccine providers, sent some people who got a first shot of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine to get their second doses at pharmacies that had only the other vaccine on hand.

Several Walgreens customers said in interviews that they scrambled, in some cases with help from pharmacy staff members, to find somewhere to get the correct second dose. Others, presumably, simply gave up.

A makeshift ward for Covid-19 patients in Delhi. The rollout of vaccinations has been uneven around the world, allowing the disease to run rampant in some countries.Credit…Atul Loke for The New York Times

  • U.S. stocks were expected to fall on Monday with oil prices amid a surge in coronavirus cases, led by the outbreak in India. More the one billion vaccinations have been administered globally, but the uneven rollout has allowed the virus to continue spreading rapidly in some countries. And so, the daily average number of cases globally has reached a new high.

  • Futures on West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. crude benchmark, fell 1.8 percent to $61 a barrel. The S&P 500 index was set to open 0.3 percent lower when trading begins, after falling 0.3 percent last week.

  • European stocks are mixed and the benchmark Stoxx Europe 600 index was little changed.

  • Still, stocks remained close to recent record highs, and on Monday, yields on U.S. Treasury bonds rose. The yield on 10-year notes climbed 3 basis points to 1.59 percent. Later this week, the Federal Reserve will announce its latest monetary policy decisions, but forecasters aren’t expecting a change. Policymakers have promised to telegraph any pull back in monetary stimulus well in advance.

  • Late last week, stocks on Wall Street rebounded from the news that the Biden administration was considering raising taxes on the wealthy, including nearly doubling the capital gains tax.

  • “With a lot of good news already priced into markets, stocks could be vulnerable to negative surprises, whether from growth disappointments, higher inflation, or policy missteps,” strategists at UBS Global Wealth Management wrote in a note.

Categories
Health

Turkey and Brazil Say Chinese language Vaccine Efficient, With Sparse Supporting Knowledge

Turkey and Brazil Say Chinese Vaccine Effective, With Sparse Supporting Data

Turkish officials announced Thursday that a vaccine made by Chinese company Sinovac has an efficacy rate of 91.25 percent. However, the finding is based on preliminary results from a small clinical study, and none of the data has been published in a journal or published online.

The announcement came a day after another ambiguous press conference, also on Sinovac’s vaccine, in Brazil. Officials there were expected to provide detailed results from another study, but they only reported that the vaccine had an efficacy rate of over 50 percent.

A total of 7,371 volunteers were involved in the Turkish study, but efficacy data from Infectious Disease Expert Serhat Unal was based on just 1,322 participants, of whom 752 received a real vaccine and 570 received the placebo.

Dr. Unal said that 26 of the volunteers who received the placebo developed Covid-19 while only three of the vaccinated volunteers became ill. He and his colleagues did not pass on their data in writing.

“Now we are sure that the vaccine is effective and safe for the Turks,” said Fahrettin Koca, the health minister.

Sinovac did not make a public statement about the trial, nor did he comment on the trial in Brazil.

Updated

Apr. 25, 2020, 4:08 pm ET

The small number of volunteers that the Turkish researchers relied on to calculate effectiveness raised questions about the safety of their conclusions. The more people take part in a vaccine clinical study, the more statistical it is.

In contrast, Pfizer and BioNTech provided data on 36,523 people to show that the vaccine had a 95 percent effectiveness rate. For their vaccine, 162 people who received the placebo developed Covid, compared to eight people in the group who received the vaccine.

Turkey has signed a contract with Sinovac for 50 million doses of the vaccine. The first three million cans are due to arrive in Turkey on Monday, Koca said. Mr Koca said Turkey will also receive 4.5 million doses of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine by the end of March. Around 1 million cans are expected to arrive by the end of January, he said.

CoronaVac, as Sinovac calls its vaccine, is made from killed coronaviruses. The method is one of the oldest for making vaccines that Jonas Salk used to make a vaccine against polio in the 1950s. After viruses are inactivated with chemicals, they cannot make people sick, but they can stimulate the immune system to make antibodies that can provide long-term protection against live viruses.

Sinovac developed CoronaVac in early 2020 and then conducted a number of clinical studies. They published their results in November. There they reported that the vaccine appeared safe and produced an immune response against the coronavirus.

The company then moved on to phase 3 trials in Brazil, Indonesia and Turkey, three countries with high rates of Covid-19.

Health officials in Brazil said Wednesday that the Chinese vaccine had passed safety and effectiveness tests that would pave the way for its use in Brazil. However, they postponed the publication of detailed data from clinical trials in Brazil on which these results are based, citing a contractual agreement with Sinovac. Dimas Covas, the director of the butantane institute that conducted the trials, said a joint announcement could be made within two weeks.

“Today is a historic day for science and for Brazilian health,” Jean Gorinchteyn, Sao Paulo State Minister of Health, told reporters at a press conference. “This will allow us to save the lives of millions of people, not just in Brazil, but around the world.”