GENEVA – The World Health Organization has listed AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford’s Covid-19 emergency vaccine, increasing 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 general of the WHO, said in a newsletter.
“We continue to call on Covid-19 vaccine developers to submit their dossiers 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.
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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.
The WHO review found that the Astrazeneca vaccine meets the safety criteria, and that its effectiveness outweighs the risks.
The AstraZeneca-Oxford survey has been praised for being cheaper and easier to distribute than some competitors, including that of PGizer-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 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine make up the majority of the doses in the COVAX coronavirus vaccination scheme, with more than 330 million doses of the shot starting from the end of February to poorer countries.
The WHO has instituted its EUL (Emergency Use Listing) process to help poorer countries without their own regulatory resources approve medicines for new diseases such as Covid-19, which could otherwise lead to delays.
The COVAX facility, co-led by vaccine alliance 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 percent of the total population of 145 participating countries.