Source: China Daily Network
China Daily Network, December 9th. The time has come to the last month of 2020, and the new crown epidemic is still raging around the world. At present, scientists around the world are racing against the virus, and the process of developing new coronavirus vaccines in various countries has entered the sprint stage.
According to the Associated Press on December 8, Morocco has begun preparing to implement a large-scale COVID-19 vaccination program, with the goal of starting to vaccinate 80% of the country's adults this month. The plan relies on a vaccine from China.
article said that Morocco is fighting the new crown epidemic, and the number of deaths from the new crown pneumonia in the country has exceeded 6,000. The North African country will pin its hopes on two vaccine candidates, one developed by China National Pharmaceutical Group and the other by Oxford University and AstraZeneca.
Abdelhakim Yahyan, senior official of the Moroccan Ministry of Health, said the first batch of vaccines will come from China, and Morocco also plans to produce vaccines locally. The country's health ministry officials said the first batch of vaccinations could be launched within days.
article stated that China Sinopharm Group's vaccine has been approved for emergency use in several countries, and the company has also conducted phase III clinical trials of the vaccine in more than 10 countries. AstraZeneca's vaccine is still being tested in countries such as the UK and the US and has not been approved yet.
Once the vaccine is approved by domestic regulatory agencies, the Moroccan government hopes to vaccinate 80% of the country's adults (25 million people). Medical staff and other frontline staff and the elderly will be the priority groups for vaccination.
article said that from August to November this year, Sinopharm Group's vaccine has been clinically tested on 600 Moroccan volunteers. According to the Moroccan Ministry of Health, early results have proved that China's vaccine is "safe and effective" and there are no serious side effects reported.
According to the website of Fortune magazine, two major vaccine manufacturers in China - China Biotechnology Co., Ltd. and Beijing Sinopharm Group's subsidiary China Kexing Zhongwei Biotechnology Co., Ltd. - seem to be launching candidate vaccines that do not require expensive cold chain networks in the coming weeks.
Currently, the vaccines of several other companies such as Pfizer and Modena in the United States are based on the newly developed messenger ribonucleic acid technology, which requires candidate vaccines to remain at sub-zero temperatures during transportation. Such restrictions will make it difficult for low- and middle-income countries to access vaccines because they require refrigerated infrastructure to distribute them.
The vaccine developed by Pfizer Pharmaceuticals and Germany's BioNTech company must be transported at minus 70 degrees Celsius, which is lower than the average winter temperature in Antarctica.
The article takes Indonesia as an example. Bio Farma, a state-owned vaccine manufacturer in the country, said that given the cold chain logistics problems in the vaccine distribution process, as the fourth largest country in the world, Indonesia cannot actually buy Pfizer's vaccine.
Huang Yanzhong, senior global health researcher at the U.S. Foreign Relations Committee, said that the transportation and distribution restrictions of Pfizer and Modena vaccines will be a vacancy in the global vaccine supply, and Chinese vaccines may fill this vacancy. China's vaccine candidate will be extremely attractive to low- and middle-income countries, especially those that are unable to afford or have the ability to maintain cold chain delivery.
