A Chinese vaccine against the new coronavirus will soon be tested in Pakistan, a country characterized by high contagion but low mortality from the disease, Pakistani authorities said on Tuesday.
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The vaccine, developed by the Chinese laboratory CanSinoBio and the Chinese Institute of Biotechnology in Beijing, is already in the third phase of clinical trials (on a large sample of humans, Editor’s note) in China, Russia, Chile and Argentina , a country that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are preparing to join, the Pakistani National Institute of Health (NIH) said.
“This will be the first time that the third phase of clinical trials will be in Pakistan,” said the NIH in a statement, for which participation in these trials “will provide Pakistan with preferential access and price to the vaccine.”
The testing campaign will be conducted in several medical establishments, including Indus Hospital in Karachi. “We hope that the vaccine will be available in three to four months,” its director, Abdul Bari, told AFP.
The coronavirus has killed 6,000 people in Pakistan, a country of more than 200 million people where mortality from the disease has been very low. Nearly 290,000 people have tested positive for the virus, a figure that is greatly underestimated according to experts interviewed by AFP. The number of cases has been dropping sharply for several weeks.