One million doses of China’s Sinovac Covid-19 shot will arrive in Hong Kong on Friday afternoon and vaccinations will begin there a week later, according to a city official.
The inoculation of priority groups with Sinovac doses is scheduled to begin on February 26, said Hong Kong’s Secretary for Civil Service Patrick Nip.
The city is relaxing social distancing restrictions from today after reporting its lowest daily number of new Covid-19 cases since late November earlier in the week.
Hong Kong recorded eight new cases from Monday, of which six are locally transmitted. In total, the city of more than seven million people has recorded 10,812 Covid infections and 197 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University tally.
In January, Sinovac was revealed to have an efficacy rate of just 50.38% in late-stage trials in Brazil — significantly lower than earlier results showed. That rate only barely crosses the 50% efficacy threshold set by the World Health Organization, and far lower than the 78% previously announced to much fanfare in China earlier this month.
The Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines have been regarded as potentially affordable and easily distributed vaccine candidates. Unlike the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, the Chinese shots do not require expensive cold storage.
Read more on the Sinovac vaccine:
https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-pandemic-vaccine-updates-02-18-21/index.html
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