China grants conditional nod to homegrown COVID-19 vaccine

TIL Desk/World/Beijing/ China has granted conditional approval to the country’s first homegrown COVID-19 vaccine developed by state-owned pharmaceutical giant Sinopharm, an official announcement said on Thursday. The approval comes a day after Sinopharm said its vaccine showed 79.34 per cent efficacy and a 99.52 per cent antibody-positive conversion rate in the interim results of the Phase III clinical trials.

‘The inactivated vaccine, developed by Beijing Biological Products Institute under Sinopharm’s subsidiary China National Biotec Group (CNBG), got official authorisation from China’s National Medical Products Administration on Wednesday,’ Chen Shifei, deputy head of the National Medical Products Administration.

The Sinopharm’s vaccine results are better than the 50 per cent standard of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Chinese authorities, the report said, adding that the vaccine also showed a good safety level. China’s National Medical Products Administration’s drug registration bureau said earlier that a total of 11 Chinese vaccine candidates are in different stages of testing at home and abroad.