BEIJING, May 8 (Xinhua) -- The World Health Organization (WHO) gave emergency use approval to a Chinese COVID-19 vaccine on Friday, a move to enable the vaccine's bigger role in the fight against the pandemic.
The safety, efficacy and quality of the vaccine underpin the emergency approval, according to the WHO. The decision also paves the way for it to be included in COVAX, the global program that aims to ensure fair and equitable distribution of vaccines among countries -- especially developing ones.
The inactivated vaccine requires easy storage conditions, which makes it highly suitable for use in low-resource settings. In other words, developing countries, where COVID vaccines are badly needed, could benefit the most.
As of Wednesday, more than 1.1 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses had been administered globally, but over 80 percent of those had been administered in high and upper-middle income countries, while just 0.3 percent in low-income countries, according to WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
So far, the WHO has issued emergency use listings to vaccines against COVID-19 made by BioNTech, Moderna and some others. The Chinese vaccine is the first from a non-Western country to gain approval.
China has vowed that its vaccines against COVID-19 will become a global public good, and the vaccine's getting WHO approval is another concrete step. Enditem
