At Least 110 Million Chinese Vaccines for WHO Vaccination Program

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The international vaccination program Covax will receive 110 million doses of vaccines from the Chinese companies Sinopharm and Sinovac through a purchase. As a result, the first corona vaccines will be available immediately, reports the international organization GAVI.

Together with the World Health Organization (WHO), it steers the international program that provides corona vaccines to developing countries.

GAVI says it will purchase 60 million doses of the drug from Sinopharm and 50 million of the corona vaccine from Sinovac. They will be delivered in the coming months. An option has also been taken to purchase hundreds of millions of additional doses. That means that until mid-2022, some 550 million injections may be supplied by the two companies.

The Covax program must guarantee that less prosperous countries also have access to corona vaccines. They often cannot compete with richer countries in the struggle to secure as many jabs as possible. Covax receives corona vaccines from affluent countries that have purchased more than they need themselves and get the funds through direct deals with pharmaceutical companies.

GAVI says deals have already been made to gain access to eleven (candidate) vaccines. This concerns the resources of AstraZeneca, Clover, Janssen, Moderna, Novavax, Pfizer/BioNTech, Sanofi/GSK, SII-Covishield, SII-Covovax, Sinopharm and Sinovac.

The organization aims to deliver about 2 billion doses to countries by early 2022 and is satisfied with the deal with the Chinese. It was closed “at a time when the Delta variant poses a threat to health systems”.