KARACHI: Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) has allowed another vaccine against Covid-19 under emergency use authorization and given approval to a local pharmaceutical company for the import and distribution of the Russian-developed Sputnik V.
Talking to a private news channel, Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Health Dr Faisal Sultan Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) granted emergency use authorization to Russian-developed Sputnik V and it became the third to be approved for emergency use in the country.
A local pharmaceutical AGP, Dr Sultan said, had been authorized as the sole importer and distributor of the Russian vaccine. “Russia’s state-owned Sputnik-V has developed a double-dose vaccine, which is administered by syringes,” he added.
“Sputnik V is the world’s first registered vaccine based on a well-studied human adenoviral vector-based platform,” said the information available on the Sputnik V website. “It currently ranks among top-10 candidate vaccines approaching the end of clinical trials and the start of mass production on the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) list.”
The ongoing Sputnik V post-registration clinical trial in Russia involved 40,000 volunteers; it said and added that clinical trials of Sputnik V had been announced in the UAE, India, Venezuela and Belarus.
Earlier, Drap authorized the Oxford University-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use in Pakistan. A couple of days later, the regulatory body approved Chinese state-owned firm Sinopharm’s Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use, the second shot to be given approval for use in the country.
Last week, Hungary became the first European Union country to approve the Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine for public distribution. A short time later the UAE also announced the same decision making it the 12th country outside of Russia which has authorized its use.
On January 16, Dr Sultan had said AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine had 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 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.
