Some 60,000 people in several countries have received Chinese experimental vaccines against COVID-19 as part of four clinical trials, a senior government official said in Beijing on Tuesday, ensuring that no subject had experienced adverse effects.
• Read also: All developments in the COVID-19 pandemic
China, where the new coronavirus first appeared at the end of last year, has since managed to virtually eradicate the epidemic. And the Asian giant is one of the countries whose research on a potential vaccine is the most advanced.
“Phase III clinical trials of the four (Chinese) vaccines are progressing,” an official from the Ministry of Science and Technology, Tian Baoguo, told reporters that about “60,000 volunteers have received an experimental vaccine” against COVID -19.
“No serious side effects have been reported,” he said.
Phase III is the last before the approval of a vaccine.
Several Chinese manufacturers are in line to produce a vaccine against COVID-19, like the companies Sinovac and Sinopharm.
The two pharmaceutical giants must suddenly look abroad to carry out tests, in particular in Brazil, Indonesia and Turkey.
In China, where only a handful of new cases of COVID-19 are now identified every day, “the conditions are no longer in place to conduct a phase III clinical trial,” Tian noted.
No vaccine in the world has yet received approval for large-scale commercial distribution. But Chinese authorities have given the green light for emergency use for some of these vaccines.
Since July, hundreds of thousands of people with jobs deemed essential in ports, hospitals and other high-risk areas have already received a vaccine.
China plans to be in capacity by the end of the year to produce 610 million doses per year of several COVID-19 vaccines.
This annual production should be increased to more than a billion doses from 2021.