China's Sinovac grants vaccine production license to Turkey, says CEO

Click to read the article in Turkish

China's Sinovac company has granted production licenses for its CoronaVac vaccine to Turkey, Brazil, Malaysia and Egypt, its CEO has announced.

Yin Weidong told Bloomberg that they were able to provide vaccines to inoculate 20 percent of the people in Brazil, Indonesia and Turkey but it wasn't enough.

Turkey has mostly relied on Sinovac for coronavirus vaccine but the company has failed to meet the agreement for 100 million vaccine doses, Minister of Health Fahrettin Koca said last week. He blamed the government of China for the delayed deliveries, saying that it prioritizes its own citizens, therefore the company could not comply with the agreement it made with Ankara.

Turkey has so far received 25 million doses of Sinovac and four million doses of BioNTech, according to the ministry.

The efficacy of Sinovac's vaccines has been discussed since its introduction. A real-world study in Chile showed last month that the vaccine was 67 percent effective in preventing symptomatic infection.

The vaccine was 85 percent effective in preventing hospitalizations and 80 percent effective in preventing deaths, according to the government of Chile.

In January, phase 3 trials in Brazil found that the efficacy of CoronaVac was only slightly over 50 percent, the minimum rate for WHO approval. Its efficacy in preventing "mild to severe" cases was 78 percent, according to the study. (PT/VK)