COVID-19 : 
BEIJING – Chinese health officials said on Thursday they had given conditional clearance to a coronavirus vaccine developed by state laboratory Sinopharm.
It is the first vaccine approved for general application in China.
The clearance came as the country carried out a vaccination campaign of 50 million people ahead of the important Lunar New Year celebration in February.
Chen Shifei, deputy commissioner of China’s National Medicines Administration, told a press conference on Thursday that the decision was taken the day before.
The vaccine was developed by the Beijing Institute of Biologics, a subsidiary of state-owned Sinopharm conglomerate.
The company said on Wednesday that according to preliminary information from the final stage of testing, the vaccine is 79.3 percent effective.
Zhang Zhan was sentenced to four years in prison.
The definitive proof of its effectiveness will depend on the publication of more data.
Sinopharm is one of at least five Chinese developers competing in the world to create vaccines against the disease that has killed more than 1.8 million people worldwide.
The conditional clearance means investigations are continuing and authorities may request more information on the safety and efficacy of certain populations with different health profiles, said Tao Lina, a former government immunologist.
Scientists identified the new strain in October, in Rio de Janeiro. To learn more about Telemundo, visit now.telemundo.com
The term generally means that a drug or product in question may be limited to certain age groups, he noted.
The authorities refused to mention a particular price. “Of course, it will be at the limit of what a person can pay,” said Zheng Zhongwei, an official with the National Health Commission.
The Beijing Institute’s vaccine is already being manufactured on a large scale, although authorities have not answered questions about current production capacity.
“Production capacity is a dynamic and continuous process,” said Mao Junfeng, deputy director of the consumer products industry department at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
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