Pakistan approves China’s Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use: sources

ISLAMABAD: The Drug Regulatory Authority (DRAP) on Monday authorised China’s Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use in Pakistan, making it the second vaccine to get local approval, ARY News reported, citing sources.

The permission was given in the DRAP registration board meeting after China’s Sinopharm sought permission from Pakistan for the emergency use of its COVID-19 vaccine in the country.

Sinopharm, a state-run Chinese firm, is developing two COVID-19 vaccines. Pakistan will purchase 1.2 million doses of the corona vaccine from China.

Pakistan is also running phase III clinical trials of another Chinese vaccine from CanSino Biologics’, led by the National Institute of Health.

Pakistan, which is seeing rising numbers of coronavirus infections, granted permission on Saturday to use Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine (AZD1222) in an emergency situation.

The Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) had given the approval for urgent-use of the British COVID-19 vaccine.

AstraZeneca has been a British-Sweden joint multinational pharma company, which has produced the vaccine in collaboration with Oxford University.

The vaccine, approved by the British Medicine and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority, is said to be effective for people of all age groups and could be stored in home refrigerators.

Pakistan Covid cases

Pakistan has reported 46 more coronavirus-related deaths in past 24 hours, surging the overall death toll to 10,977.

According to the latest statistics of the National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) the COVID-19 has claimed 46 more lives and 1,920 fresh infections were reported.

In the past 24 hours, as many as 1,589 patients have recovered from the virus in a day and 2,348 patients are in critical condition.

The total count of active cases is 34,986.