GENEVA – Two Chinese vaccines are in the "very advanced stage" of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Emergency Use Listing Procedure (EUL) assessment, the Xinhua news agency reported a WHO official as saying yesterday.
The vaccines, produced by Sinovac and Sinopharm, are among four vaccines in the very advanced phase of approval, said Mariangela Simao, assistant WHO director-general for Access to Medicines, Vaccines and Pharmaceuticals, at a press conference.
A team WHO experts are now in China, and they "will start inspections next week" after completing a quarantine period, she said.
This could speed up approval for the vaccine, as Sinovac and Sinopharm have completed several Phase 3 trials, as shown on the WHO website.
The EUL, a process for licensing new vaccines by the WHO, is important for many applications, not least to be approved as part of the Covax facility for efficient and equitable global access to Covid-19 vaccines.
So far, only the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has received EUL approval. Two other vaccines – Britain's AstraZeneca and South Korea's SK Bioscience – are also being assessed, Simao said.
As the world is struggling to contain the pandemic, vaccination is under way in some countries with the authorised coronavirus vaccines.
Meanwhile, 238 candidate vaccines are in development worldwide – 63 of them in clinical trials – in countries such as Germany, China, Russia, Britain and the US. – Bernama, February 6, 2021
