Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine granted conditional market approval in China

BEIJING - China's National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) on Friday granted conditional market approval to CoronaVac, an inactivated COVID-19 vaccine developed by Sinovac Biotech, the company said on Saturday.

The Sinovac vaccine, produced by the Beijing-based Sinovac Life Sciences Co. Ltd., affiliated with Sinovac Biotech, was approved for emergency use in China last June. The vaccine started being used for emergency inoculation among some special groups in the country from July last year.

From this January, countries including Indonesia, Turkey, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay and Laos successively approved the emergency use of the Sinovac vaccine locally.

These countries recognize the clinical research results of the vaccine, believing it has obvious effects on reducing the medical treatment, hospitalization, critical cases and deaths caused by COVID-19, and is of great importance to pandemic prevention and control, Sinovac Biotech said in a press release on its website.

Sinovac Life Sciences Co. Ltd. on Feb 3 filed an application for conditional market approval of CoronaVac, which was granted on the basis of the vaccine's overseas phase-3 clinical trials for two months, it said.

The NMPA requested the company to continue to carry out relevant clinical trials, fulfill the conditional requirements, and submit the follow-up research results in time.

"We expect to provide more safe and effective vaccines as soon as possible and help control COVID-19 ultimately by increasing inoculation rates, enabling social and economic development to return to the normal track," said Yin Weidong, chairman and CEO of Sinovac.

According to the company, the vaccination procedure includes two shots with an interval of 14 to 28 days, and each dose is 0.5 ml.