Nearly one million people have been administered a COVID-19 vaccine by China’s National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm), the company claimed on Wednesday, through the emergency use programme approved by Beijing in July.
The programme allows for the use of three vaccine candidates, including two from Sinopharm and one from Sinovac. Zhejiang authorities said the vaccine developed by Sinopharm had been given to almost one million people.
Incidentally, the Abu Dhabi Health COVID-19 Research Ethics Committee is listed as the ethics committee for all three vaccines, as per the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry.
“In terms of emergency use, the vaccines were applied to nearly a million people and there has not been a single case of a serious adverse event. People have had only mild symptoms,” Liu Jingzhen, chairman of Sinopharm said in an interview with a Sichuan-based digital media company that was published on Wednesday, the South China Morning Post reported.
Vaccines by SinoVac, in the meantime, were adminsitered to high risk groups in an east-China province.
China began inoculating members of the military in July, with emergency use for the vaccines allowed in August, from when people started receiving the doses.
All the vaccines are still undergoing Phase 3 clinical trials.
In October, Xinhua reported that 60,000 volunteers had been given Chinese COVID-19 vaccines as part of phase-3 clinical trials, with no severe side-effects reported.
The SinoVac vaccine was also being trialled in Brazil. However, the same was halted after one participant recorded a “serious adverse reaction”, a move President Jair Bolsonaro dubbed a “victory”. Bolsonaro had long opposed the use of the Chinese vaccines in Brazil.
The SinoVac vaccine is currently undergoing Phase-3 trials in Brazil, Indonesia, and Turkey. The SinoPharm vaccine, meanwhile, has been undergoing Phase-3 trials in the United Arab Emirates, with Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum reportedly receiving a dose of it on November 3.
