All 11 vaccines in China are at different stages of testing and await final approval.
Beijing:
Days after joining the World Health Organization (WHO) COVAX alliance to equitably distribute COVID-19 vaccines around the world, China ramped up the use of its coronavirus vaccines in three other cities for urgent use.
Three more cities in eastern China’s Zhejiang province step up efforts to offer COVID-19 vaccines for urgent use, with priority given to key groups in need before they can be released to the general public, according to official media.
The cities of Yiwu, Ningbo and Shaoxing are targeting key groups in urgent need of COVID-19 vaccinations as a result of Jiaxing City, the Global Times reported on Saturday, as quoted by another daily, The Paper.
Earlier Thursday, health authorities in Jiaxing announced that the city is administering inactivated COVID-19 vaccines among high-risk groups and will gradually offer it to ordinary citizens for urgent use.
According to the report, emergency vaccinations have officially started in Yiwu, an internationally renowned manufacturing center.
On Friday afternoon, around 20 people visited the community health center to receive COVID-19 vaccinations in less than an hour.
Most recipients are either ready to go overseas or plan to go overseas in the near future, The Paper reported.
Yiwu health officials said the COVID-19 injections have reached the local medical system and are limited to a small portion of the population in need of emergency vaccination, including frontline medical staff, staff who provides basic city operations and officials who must travel to high-risk countries and regions for official duties, according to the Global Times report.
Yiwu also does not intend to make the vaccine available to the general public at that time, but may consider offering the vaccination to the public if there is a plentiful supply when the vaccine is officially on the market. market, he said.
On October 9, China joined the WHO COVAX alliance to fairly distribute COVID-19 speculation that it plans to provide its vaccines to developing countries to improve its image tainted by the pandemic since it emerged in Wuhan in December of last year.
All 11 vaccines in China are at different stages of testing and await final approval.
COVAX is a global initiative to work with vaccine manufacturers to provide countries around the world with equitable access to safe and effective vaccines, once they are licensed and approved.
China has traveled to more than a dozen countries to conduct end-stage trials of investigational COVID-19 vaccines made in China, and has even started immunizing thousands of emergency workers.
Yang Sheng, deputy director of the drug registration office of the National Medicines Administration, said earlier that four COVID-19 vaccines developed in China entered the final phase of human trials abroad after obtaining the approval of foreign authorities.
China has focused on developing five types of vaccines, and each method has at least one ongoing clinical trial.
A total of 11 candidate vaccines are in different stages of testing, Yang said earlier in state media.
Zheng Zhongwei, head of the Chinese Vaccine Development Task Force, said China’s annual capacity to manufacture COVID-19 vaccines is expected to reach 610 million doses this year and one billion doses by 2021.
WHO said nine candidate vaccines are currently under evaluation for inclusion in the COVAX facility.
They include two from China, two from the United States, one from the Republic of Korea, one from Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and a global multi-manufacturer partnership.
Two of them are in trial phase I, two are technology transfers and the others are at the discovery stage.
The coronavirus has so far killed 4,634 people with 85,672 confirmed infections in China.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
