Health

Pakistan approves emergency use of Chinese Covid vaccine CanSino

Islamabad,Feb 12 (efe-epa).- Pakistan has authorized the emergency use of the anti-Covid vaccine developed by Chinese pharma company CanSino, an official told EFE on Friday, weeks after authorities began a vaccination campaign using the vaccine produced by another Chinese company Sinopharm.

The Prime Minister’s special assistant on national health, Faisal Sultan, confirmed to EFE that Pakistani regulators had approved the vaccine candidate produced by China’s CanSino Biologics.

In September Pakistan began carrying out phase three trials of the vaccine, named “Ad5-nCoV” and jointly developed by the Chinese military medical research institute.

Sultan had said last week that the candidate had produced satisfactory results.

On Tuesday, Pakistani authorities began administering the first batch of 500,000 Chinese SinoPharm vaccines donated by Beijing, as part of a phase-by-phase campaign prioritizing health workers.

Recently, the country’s health ministry revealed in a statement that Pakistan had also secured 17 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, of which 6-6.8 million doses will be available within the first quarter and the remaining in the second quarter of 2021.

After witnessing a peak in coronavirus infections in June, Pakistan has registered a sharp decline in the number of fresh cases.

The country has registered a total of 560,363 infections so far, including 1,270 registered in the last 24 hours, while 33 new deaths were registered since Thursday, taking the total death toll to 12,218. EFE-EPA

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