Beijing: Chinese officials announced Monday that they have approved a new COVID-19 vaccine for immediate use by military personnel.
The vaccine, called Ad5-nCoV, is currently being evaluated in clinical trials.
It is unclear how many of the nearly 2.2 million people who serve in the Chinese military will receive the vaccine.
Ad5-nCoV was developed as part of a collaborative effort between the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology, part of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, which is the military’s research division, and the biotechnology firm CanSino Biologics.
In a filing with the Hong Kong stock exchange, CanSino said the vaccine has “a good safety profile” and demonstrated the potential to prevent COVID-19 in pre-clinical studies in animals.
Ad5-nCoV is built upon CanSino’s adenovirus-based viral vector vaccine technology platform, which has also been successfully applied to develop the globally innovative vaccine against Ebola virus infection, the company said.
“The vaccines that are now becoming available for testing did not exist three years ago, so we have no experience with how effective they will be and how safe they will be,” Barry Bloom, professor of public health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said last week during a conference call with reporters.
