Staff Report
ISLAMABAD: As the world competes fiercely for the early acquisition of the Covid-19 vaccines, Pakistani officials, healthcare workers and common people have pinned their hope on Chinese CanSino Biologics anti-coronavirus vaccines, says a report published by Gwadar Pro on Friday.
Pakistani health experts say that the CanSino vaccine, with promising results during its clinical trials, would be the best option for Pakistanis, having been tested over the indigenous population of the country.
The CanSino vaccine is not the only Chinese vaccine Pakistanis would benefit from, as China announced last week 500,000 doses of the Sinopharm anti-coronavirus vaccine as a gift to Pakistan and according to Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, this life-saving gift will reach Pakistan by January 31, to be followed by 1.1 million more doses by the end of February.
Pakistan’s National Command and Operation Center (NCOC) announced the launch of phase-III clinical trials in the country for CanSino Vaccine in end-September 2020.
Five different hospitals across the country, with the National Institute of Health (NIH) as principal investigator, initiated the trials with a sample size of 18,000.
Talking to China Economic Net (CEN), Dr. Ghazala Parveen, Chief of Biological Production Division NIH said, “So far, we have vaccinated 17,500 volunteers during a double-blind placebo control trial where 50% of people got the vaccine and 50 % got a placebo”. Placebo is a substance with no therapeutic value.
According to her, the trial is moving towards successful completion; during the trial, no severe adverse events have been reported so far. Around 50% of the samples have been sent to Dalhousie University in Canada for analysis. “We are hopeful to get the complete analysis by mid-February,” she said.
Dr Ghazala Parveen said that Pakistan and China have always enjoyed friendly relations and right at the beginning of the pandemic, China provided Pakistan with masks, sanitizers and testing kits etc. According to her, picking Pakistan for the vaccine trial is another friendly gesture from China; if the results of the trials are positive, it will help to select this vaccine for future use.
“We hope to get a large quantity of CanSino vaccine from China,” Dr Ghazala said, adding, “We also expect technology transfer from China to Pakistan to produce CanSino vaccine in the future”.
