The general public now has access to this cutting-edge vaccination technology as a result of China’s approval of the first mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.
The general public now has access to this cutting-edge vaccination technology as a result of China’s approval of the first mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.
The National Medical Products Administration of China has authorised the mRNA vaccine created by CSPC Pharmaceutical Group Ltd. for use in emergency situations in China, the company said in a statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange on Wednesday.
The claim is based on a clinical study that involved 4,000 sequential booster immunisation cases and was carried out between December 10, 2022, and January 18, 2023.
The study used a recombinant protein vaccine as a control, and the results showed that the efficacy of the mRNA vaccine was 70.2 percent from the 7th to the 28th day after booster vaccination.
From the 14th to the 28th day after a booster shot, the mRNA vaccine’s effectiveness remained at 85,3%. According to CSPC, the vaccine is the first mRNA vaccine product that China independently developed and that has been given permission to be used in an emergency on the Chinese mainland.
To advance research and development of iterations of mRNA vaccine against the new strains, the company will fully take into account the mutation of the COVID-19 variants and predict the variation trend of future strains.
The mRNA vaccine known as BNT162b2, which was previously authorised in the special administrative regions of Hong Kong, Macao, and the island of Taiwan, was not entirely created on the Chinese mainland.
The approval, which comes years after mRNA vaccines became widely used around the globe, gives the country another tool in its arsenal as it fights COVID-19.
It is also anticipated to strengthen China’s sole reliance on domestic vaccines to immunise its 1.4 billion people. In April 2022, the NMPA approved the mRNA vaccine developed by CSPC and the mRNA vaccine produced by the Chinese company CanSino Biologics for clinical trials.
The mRNA vaccine BNT162b2, which was created in collaboration with China’s Fosun Pharma and Germany’s BioNTech, has not yet received approval from the Chinese government for use on the mainland.
The number of positive COVID-19 infections in China is continuing to decline, according to the most recent statistics from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and there are still more than 4,000 positive nucleic acid testing results every day.
Liu Jue, a researcher from the School of Public Health at Peking University and member of the expert panel for China’s National Health Commission, asserted on Wednesday that COVID-19 has not vanished but continues to be an epidemic at low levels.