WHO Approves Emergency Use Listing for China’s Sinopharm CCP Virus Vaccine

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday approved China’s state-owned Sinopharm CCP virus vaccine for emergency use for adults over 18. This comes despite concerns raised by a separate group of WHO experts who said they had “very low confidence” regarding the risk of serious side-effects in some patients. The Sinopharm jab’s inclusion on the WHO’s emergency use listing allows it to be included in COVAX, a global program that provides vaccines mainly for poor countries. “This expands the list of [COVID-19] vaccines that COVAX can buy, and gives countries confidence to expedite their own regulatory approval, and to import and administer a vaccine,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a briefing. The WHO had already given emergency approval to COVID-19 vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and more recently, Moderna. The decision to approve Sinopharm’s vaccine was taken by WHO’s technical advisory group, which began meeting on …