Sinovac sends half a million Covid-19 vaccines to Algeria in its first Covax shipment

[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

Sinovac sends half a million vaccines to Algeria in its first Covax shipment

Delivered via the global sharing scheme, the jabs were bought by Unicef under a deal for Sinovac to supply it with up to 200 million doses this year.

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Chinese firm Sinovac Biotech has shipped more than half a million of its
Covid-19 vaccines
to Algeria, in its first delivery for the
World Health Organization
-backed
Covax Facility
, the company said on Sunday.

A shipment containing 567,600 doses of the CoronaVac vaccine was expected to arrive in Algiers, the Algerian capital, on Monday after being sent on Friday, Sinovac said.
The company said that the batch of vaccines was bought by Unicef. A partner of Covax, the United Nations agency in July signed a long-term supply agreement for CoronaVac under which Sinovac promised to provide up to 200 million doses this year.
Algeria had recorded 194,671 confirmed cases of Covid-19 as of Monday, with 5,179 deaths, and by August 22 had administered more than 4 million vaccine doses. It has a population of about 43 million.


China has in recent months increased its contributions to Covax, with President Xi Jinping this month pledging US$100 million to the scheme at an
international forum
to promote “fair and reasonable” vaccine distribution worldwide. At the same forum, Foreign Minister Wang Yi
said China would donate
at least 100 million vaccine doses to Covax by the end of October.


CoronaVac is an inactivated vaccine, which uses a weakened or dead virus to trigger an immune response.



In a recent large-scale study conducted in Brazil,
researchers found that both the Sinovac and AstraZeneca vaccines were effective in reducing hospitalisations, severe illness and death from Covid-19. However, the study found that the Sinovac jab was much less effective in reducing the risk of death in those aged over 80 and offered less protection against infection.



The results of the study were largely in line with an interim efficacy study in Brazil last year, in which the Sinovac vaccine’s overall protection was only 50.4 per cent, much lower than the 83.5 per cent reported by Turkey in a phase 3 trial this year.
Separately, a
study conducted in Chile
in July found the vaccine to be 87.5 per cent effective in preventing hospitalisation and 66.5 per cent effective against infection, but researchers said that the results could have been related to a higher number of younger participants.


Globally the current caseload of confirmed Covid-19 cases stands at about 216 million, according to the WHO.