Pakistan places orders for single-dose Cansino Bio vaccine

KARACHI: Pakistan has placed an order to purchase single-dose Chinese vaccine Ad5-nCoV vaccine (Cansino Bio) for Covid-19 and its first batch is expected to be delivered to Pakistan ‘within a week’, National Health Services, Regulation and Coordination (NHS, R&C) told The News on Tuesday.

“We have placed an order for the purchase of CanSino Biologics Inc.’s single-dose vaccine and its first tranche of 60,000 doses is expected to be delivered to Pakistan within a week,” an official of the National Health Serivces told The News but added that no exact date of vaccine delivery could be given at the moment.

The official said the single-dose Chinese vaccine could be administered to people of all ages as it was found effective among people from 18 to 80 plus years of age during trials in Pakistan and other countries of the world. The NHS official added that one-dose was ‘logistically very good’ for deployment in countries like Pakistan.

The official further disclosed that the CanSino Biologics Inc.’s vaccine would also be ‘manufactured partially in Pakistan,’ following its successful conclusion of trials at five leading health institutions in the country. The registration board of Pakistan’s Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) had given emergency use authorization to CanSino Biologics’s single-dose vaccine in the second week of February 2021 after the Chinese manufacturer released interim efficacy results from a multi-country trial, which included Pakistan, showing 65.7% efficacy in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 cases and a 90.98% success rate in stopping severe infections. Special Assistant to Prime Minister (SAPM) on Health Dr Faisal Sultan also expressed satisfaction over the interim results of the trials of the CanSinoBIO vaccine. The sample size for the analysis comprised 30,000 participants and 101 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the health minister said last week, adding that no serious safety concerns were raised in the study.

To a query, he said vaccine manufacturing facility was being upgraded with the help of CanSino Biologics Inc.’s at NIH Islamabad, which is currently undergoing reorganization and added that Pakistani scientists and experts would be trained by the Chinese biotechnology firm for manufacturing the vaccine.

Pakistan is planning to vaccinate its 40-50 million adult population with mix-and-match of Chinese as well as European vaccines while limited quantity of mRNA vaccines developed by the Pfizer-BioNtech and Moderna could also be used subject to their availability, for which storage and deployment capacity was being enhanced, the official maintained.