AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine has been approved for emergency use in Pakistan, the Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Health Faisal Sultan said on Saturday, making it the first coronavirus vaccine to get the green light for use in the South Asian country. Asad Umar, who is also the head of the national agency for COVID-19, told Geo TV that the vaccine in the first phase will be administered to health workers and those aged 65 and above. Umar said the Chinese company CanSino is also holding clinical trials in Pakistan and hoped its vaccine would also be registered next month.
He said Pakistan will get the vaccines through the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, or GAVI, and other alternative international sources. The AstraZeneca vaccine is being prepared in India which has strained relations with rival Pakistan and says it will prioritize its own population.
The Chinese vaccine is awaiting approval from the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP), which has received and reviewed its data. Pakistan is speaking to a number of vaccine makers, and Sultan said the country could get “in the range of tens of millions” of vaccine doses under an agreement with China’s CanSinoBio. The vaccine company’s Ad5-nCoV COVID-19 candidate is nearing completion of Phase III clinical trials in Pakistan. Efficacy is a key factor, said Sultan. “We have and are watching the evolving stories around the efficacy of a number of vaccines.”
The vaccine is designed by scientists at the University of Oxford and produced by AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical company. Pakistan reported 43 deaths in the last 24 hours, taking the total number of fatalities due to the disease to 10,951, according to the ministry of National Health Services. The total number of Covid-19 cases in the country reached 519,291 after 2,521 new infections were detected in the past 24 hours.
