Sri Lanka received the final consignment of the Sinopharm Covid-19 vaccines purchased by the State Pharmaceutical Corporation(SPC) yesterday, September 18.
The Chinese Embassy on its twitter account said that it successfully completed the contract with the SPC with yesterday’s supply of four million vaccine doses.
The total number of Sinopharm vaccines that was delivered to Sri Lanka has reached 26 million, and according to the Embassy, Chinese vaccines have supported 80 percent of Sri Lanka’s inoculation drive.
Earlier this month, China delivered another batch of four million Sinopharm vaccine doses to Sri Lanka and has pledged to donate one million doses of Sinovac vaccines.
Sinovac is used in 50 countries and up to 1.4 billion doses of Sinovac have been administered by the end of last month. The WHO recommends the Sinovac for those “18 and above, in a two-dose schedule with a spacing of two to four weeks”.
According to the WHO, the efficacy is 51percentto prevent symptomatic disease and 100 percent for preventing hospitalisation.
The National Medicines Regulatory Authority approved the emergency use of the Sinopharm Covid-19 vaccine in the country on March 20, this year. The Sinovac vaccine received approval in July this year. The first batch of 600,000 Sinopharm doses, which was a donation from the Government of China, arrived in late March this year.
The Sinopharm coronavirus vaccine is produced by China National Biotec Group (CNBG) – a subsidiary of China National Pharmaceutical Group Corporation (Sinopharm). The second Chinese vaccine is produced by Sinovac Biotech Ltd, a China-based biopharmaceutical company.