Pakistan’s first locally-produced COVID-19 vaccine has been named PakVac. The Pakistan-made vaccine has passed the internal QA testing and is set to be rolled out soon.
Taking to Twitter, SAPM on Health, Dr. Faisal Sultan, congratulated the National Institute of Health (NIH) for indigenously manufacturing the COVID-19 vaccine originally developed by a Chinese firm, CanSinoBIO.
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Congratulations to the NIH Pak team and its leadership for successful fill/finish (from concentrate) of the Cansino vaccine with the help of Cansino Bio Inc. China. The product has passed the rigorous internal QA testing. An imp step to help in our vaccine supply line pic.twitter.com/hrkySTJxPX
— Faisal Sultan (@fslsltn) May 24, 2021
The first batch of the single-dose PakVac vaccine consisting of 124,000 doses has been developed at the NIH with assistance from Chinese scientists. The next batches of the CanSinoBIO’s COVID-19 vaccine will be produced solely by the NIH.
NIH had started the local manufacturing of the Chinese vaccine after its raw material reached Pakistan earlier this month.
Also known as Ad5-nCoV, CanSinoBIO originally developed the Coronavirus vaccine in collaboration with the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology and tested it in large-scale phase-III clinical trials that were held in five countries, including Pakistan, in which more than 40,000 volunteers participated.
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Results of trials were published in February this year which confirmed that the CanSinoBIO vaccine was 65% effective at preventing symptomatic cases and 91% effective at preventing severe infection. As for the Pakistani subset, the vaccine offered 75% protection against symptomatic cases and 100% protection against severe infection.
DRAP had granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to CanSinoBIO’s COVID-19 vaccine in February as well because no serious safety concerns and side-effects of the CanSinoBIO vaccine were reported during the multination clinical trials.
