China’s Sinopharm Covid-19 vaccine approved by WHO

The Sinopharm Covid-19 vaccine of China has been approved by the World Health Organization for emergency use.

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The UN health agency signed off on the two-dose vaccine, which is already being deployed in dozens of countries around the world.

The WHO has already given emergency use listing to the vaccines being made by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, J&J, and the AstraZeneca jab being produced at sites in India and in South Korea.

The Sinopharm vaccine is an inactivated coronavirus vaccine, like Covaxin developed by Bharat Biotech India (BBIL) in collaboration with the National Institute of Virology (NIV).

Inactivated vaccines take the disease-carrying virus (in this case SARS-CoV-2) and kill it using heat, chemicals or radiation. WHO notes that these vaccines take longer to make and might need two or three doses to be administered. The flu and polio vaccines use this approach as well.