BAKU, Azerbaijan, Dec. 10
Trend:
As the global race to produce a COVID-19 vaccine continues, China appears to have made huge strides, with one of its vaccine front-runners, Sinovac, already making its way abroad, Trend reports citing BBC.
The BBC said that shipments of Beijing-based biopharmaceutical company Sinovac's COVID-19 vaccine CoronaVac have arrived in Indonesia in preparation for a mass vaccination campaign, with another 1.8 million doses due to arrive by January.
But the agency said that the vaccine is yet to finish its late-stage trials, which begs the question: what exactly do we know about this Chinese vaccine?
The report said that CoronaVac is an inactivated vaccine, which works by using killed viral particles to expose the body's immune system to the virus without risking a serious disease response.
"CoronaVac is a more traditional method [of vaccine] that is successfully used in many well-known vaccines like rabies," Associate Prof Luo Dahai of the Nanyang Technological University told the BBC.
The report said that one of Sinovac's main advantages is that it can be stored in a standard refrigerator at 2-8 degrees Celsius, which means that the vaccine is a lot more useful to more countries.