WHO Inches Closer to Approval of Chinese Sinopharm and Sinovac Vaccines

The World Health Organization (WHO) appears to be inching towards the approval of the Chinese Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines as it struggles to fill a looming vaccine vacuum left by India’s Serum Institute – which has halted exports as the country continues to reel from a tragic coronavirus outbreak. To get more news about sinopharm vaccine: latest update, you can visit shine news official website.

Meanwhile, the WHO declared the latest Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo to be over, just three months after the first case was reported in North Kivu.The Chinese vaccines from Sinopharm and Sinovac could be approved by the end of this week, noted the WHO Assistant Director-General for Drug Access, Vaccines and Pharmaceuticals Mariangela Simao, speaking at a WHO press conference on Monday.

“We are finalizing the assessment of Sinopharm [but] there’s still some documentation that needs to be added,” she said. “We will start the final assessment for the listing of Sinovac on the fifth [of May], so we expect both the Chinese vaccines [to] be finalized by the end of this week.”

If both vaccines receive the WHO’s green light, China could could become the world’s largest vaccine supplier, assuming that Sinovac and Sinopharm will honor their commitment to produce two billion vaccine doses this year.

Despite the lack of published data for the two vaccines, as well as their hefty price, both seem to have met the WHO’s minimum efficacy requirement of 50%, the WHO’s chairperson of Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) said late last month.

With regards to the WHO’s approval of another vaccine frontrunner that seems to be significantly more potent and cheaper than its Chinese counterparts, Russia’s Sputnik V, the WHO expects a final decision by June or even July, said Simao.

“WHO still does not have the entire dossier [for Sputnik], it’s not complete yet,” she said, noting that the WHO is in the process of assessing good clinical practices for Sputnik V and is set to begin evaluating manufacturing practices next Monday until early June.

“We expect that as soon as we have the entire dossier, plus the compliance to both good manufacturing practices and the good clinical practice, the vaccine can be assessed then by the technical expert group [SAGE] and we expect that this is likely to happen [by the] end of June or probably in July.”