GENEVA, June 1 (Xinhua) – The World Health Organization (WHO), on June 1, validated the CoronaVac COVID-19 vaccine developed by Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac for emergency use.
At the WHO press conference, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that the Sinovac-CoronaVac vaccine has been given WHO Emergency Use Listing “after being found to be safe, effective, and quality assured”. The easy storage requirements of CoronaVac make it very suitable for low resource settings. Since then, two inactivated vaccines developed by China National Biotec Group and Sinovac have been officially included in the WHO Emergency Use Listing.
On May 7, 2021, WHO announced that the inactivated COVID-19 vaccine developed by Beijing Bio-Institute of Biological Products, a subsidiary of the Sinopharm Group’s China National Biotec Group, was approved by WHO for emergency use. It is the sixth COVID-19 vaccine in the world and the first one in China granted by WHO for emergency use.
WHO’s Emergency Use Listing (EUL) is a prerequisite for COVAX facility vaccine supply. It also allows countries to expedite their own regulatory approval to import and administer COVID-19 vaccines. China’s COVID-19 vaccines are going global. So far, 280 million people in China have been vaccinated against COVID-19, of which, over 240 million people have been administered Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines. Furthermore, over 45 countries or regions have approved these two vaccines for use.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.