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Under the agreements, Chinese vaccine makers Sinopharm and Sinovac will immediately begin making 110 million doses available, according to a press release from Gavi, a public-private partnership for global health that co-leads COVAX, an initiative global aimed at countries regardless of wealth.
The agreements came at a time when “the Delta variant poses an increasing risk to health systems,” Gavi said in the statement.
Gavi has the ability to purchase a total of 170 Sinopharm vaccines and 380 million Sinovac vaccines, Gavi said.
As of June 30, Sinovac has delivered more than a billion doses worldwide, the company’s chairman and chief executive officer Weidong Yin said in a statement on the COVAX deal.
“Our mission at Sinovac is to provide vaccines with the aim of eliminating human diseases,” he said.
The new agreements were welcomed by Dr Seth Berkley, managing director of Gavi, who said vaccines were an example of Gavi’s strategy to ensure that there were “options in the face of constraints such as delays in delivery. ‘supply’.
COVAX’s rollout was delayed earlier this year, after a coronavirus crisis in India prevented the country’s largest vaccine maker from delivering millions of vaccines on time.
Monday’s announcement comes as Chinese vaccines come under increasing scrutiny for their effectiveness, especially against the rapidly spreading Delta variant.
Thai health officials said on Monday that health workers would receive a booster from AstraZeneca or Pfizer, after 618 of the more than 677,000 medical staff who received two doses of Sinovac tested positive for Covid-19. Of the 618 who tested positive, only two became seriously ill, including a nurse who died.
“Despite this, all vaccines have been shown to be effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths,” Foreign Ministry official Pensom Lertsithichai said on Monday, adding that medical workers were highly exposed to Covid-19, which could have contribute to “vaccination”. failure.”
Officials in Singapore said last week they would exclude Sinovac injections from the city-state’s total immunization count due to inadequate efficacy data for the vaccine, especially against the Delta variant, Reuters reported.
Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines have been validated by the World Health Organization (WHO) for emergency use.
So far, trials show that Sinopharm and Sinovac have lower efficacy against Covid-19 than their mRNA counterparts. In Brazilian trials, Sinovac was around 50% effective against symptomatic Covid-19 and 100% effective against severe disease, according to test data submitted to the WHO. The effectiveness of Sinopharm for symptomatic and hospitalized illnesses has been estimated at 79%, according to the WHO.
The vaccines from Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna – which have also signed agreements with COVAX – are more than 90% effective against symptomatic Covid-19.
COVAX has legally binding contracts with manufacturers for around 3.8 billion doses – and 1.9 billion of these are expected to be available for supply by the end of the year, according to the latest forecasts from global supply of COVAX. According to the UNICEF vaccine supply dashboard, 107.5 million doses have been shipped via COVAX to 135 countries.
CNN’s Yong Xiong contributed reporting.
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