National Control Laboratory for Biologicals (NCLB) of the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) has reportedly given approval to the country’s first locally-packaged single-dose COVID-19 vaccine, PakVac.
According to reports, PakVac will be officially unveiled in a formal ceremony soon and will be available for general use by the end of the week.
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PakVac is being prepared at the National Institute of Health (NIH) with the help of a Chinese medical firm, CanSino Biologics. NIH had started the local preparation of the vaccine after its raw material reached Pakistan from China last month.
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.
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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.
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.
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