China conditionally approves one-shot recombinant COVID-19 vaccine

BEIJING -- The Chinese National Medical Products Administration granted conditional market approval to a recombinant novel coronavirus vaccine that requires only one shot.

Developed by a research team led by Chen Wei, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a researcher at the Institute of Military Medicine under the Academy of Military Sciences, it is China's first approved COVID-19 vaccine that relies on adenovirus as the vector to deliver the coronavirus spike gene into the body.

Targeting people aged above 18, the vaccine can be transported and stored at a temperature ranging from 2 to 8 degrees Celsius.

The vaccine shows a 65.7-percent efficacy at preventing symptomatic cases and a 90.98-percent efficacy against severe disease in an interim analysis of its global phase-3 clinical trials, according to media reports. In the Pakistan subset, its efficacy at preventing symptomatic cases is 74.8 percent and 100 percent at preventing severe disease.