GENEVA (Reuters) – The World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday listed the COVID-19 vaccine from AstraZeneca and Oxford for emergency use, which increases access to the relatively inexpensive shot in the developing world.
“We now have all the pieces available for the rapid distribution of vaccines. But we still need to scale up production,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director of the WHO, said in a newsletter.
“We continue to call on COVID19 vaccine developers to submit their files to the WHO for review at the same time as they submit them to regulators in high-income countries,” he said.
A WHO statement said the vaccine was approved as manufactured by AstraZeneca-SKBio (Republic of Korea) and the Serum Institute of India.
“In the first half of 2021, it is hoped that more than 300 million doses of the vaccine will be available through COVAX to 145 countries, pending the supply and operational challenges,” the British drugmaker said in a separate statement announcing the approval. .
The UN health agency’s list comes days after a WHO panel issued interim recommendations on the vaccine, saying that two doses should be given to all adults with an interval of about 8 to 12 weeks, and that it could be used is in countries with the South African variant. of the coronavirus as well.
The WHO review found that the Astrazeneca vaccine meets the safety criteria, and that its effectiveness outweighs the risks.
COVAX PART PROGRAM
The AstraZeneca / Oxford survey was praised for being cheaper and easier to distribute than some competitors, including Pfizer / BioNTech, which was listed by the WHO in late December.
It is reported that nearly 109 million people worldwide have been infected by the new coronavirus and more than 2.5 million have died, according to a Reuters version. Infections have been reported in more than 210 countries and territories since the first cases were identified in China in December 2019.
The AstraZeneca vaccine forms the bulk of the doses in the COVAX initiative to share coronavirus vaccines, and more than 330 million doses of the shot will be released to poorer countries by the end of February.
The WHO has instituted its EUL (Emergency Use Listing) process to help poorer countries without their own regulatory resources to quickly approve medicines with new diseases such as COVID-19, which could otherwise lead to delays.
The COVAX facility, which is co-led with GAVI, the World Health Organization, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and the UN Children’s Fund, said doses would cover an average of 3.3% of the total population of 145 participating countries.
(Reporting by John Revill, John Miller, Michael Shields in Zurich, Kate Kelland in London, Additional Reporting by Nandakumar D, Editing by William Maclean)