ISLAMABAD: Special Assistant to the Prime Minister Dr Faisal Sultan on Saturday said AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine has been approved for emergency use in Pakistan making it the first coronavirus vaccine to get the green light for use in the South Asian country.
Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) granted emergency use authorization to AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine, the country’s health minister said. Pakistan, which is in the midst of the second wave of coronavirus infections, Dr Faisal said it would procure more than a million doses of Sinopharm’s vaccine, but the Chinese vaccine has not yet been approved by the DRAP.
Pakistan is in the process of speaking to a number of vaccine makers, and Sultan said the country could get “in the range of tens of millions” of vaccine doses under an agreement with China’s CanSinoBio.
The vaccine company’s Ad5-nCoV COVID-19 candidate is currently nearing completion of phase III clinical trials in Pakistan. Pakistan reported 2,432 new coronavirus infections and 45 deaths on Friday, taking the total number of cases to more than 516,000 and deaths close to 11,000.
Sultan said the federal cabinet approved the Economic Coordination Committee’s (ECC) recommendation to allocate $150 million to acquire a vaccine for the novel coronavirus. He said the government hopes to procure the COVID-19 vaccine in the first quarter of 2021.
Dr Sultan said that the government will consider multiple factors before procuring a vaccine, which includes: type of vaccine, efficacy and storage requirements. “Several companies that are working on the development of a vaccine have been shortlisted and initial negotiations have started”, the SAPM added.
He said the vaccine will be administered to the COVID-19 patients in stages: frontline healthcare workers will be the first priority; in the second stage, the elderly and at risk-population, in addition to other healthcare workers, will get the vaccine; and the common public will receive the vaccine in the third stage.
Dr Sultan further said that while $150m has been approved for vaccine procurement, the authorities will request the government to approve more funds if required.
The federal cabinet was also requested to constitute a committee comprising four or five members to oversee the procurement of the vaccine in order to ensure transparency, he added.
