The monthly production is as per schedule three million doses. A total of 124,000 CanSino shots have been developed in the first phase. Pakistan purchased 13 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine from three Chinese companies, procured from Sinopharm, CanSinoBio. The World Health Organization too validated the Sinovac-CoronaVac Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use.

The largest armed force in the world, China’s People’s Liberation Army, is not known for its cutting edge medical research. But since 2015, it has ramped up recruitment of scientists, and investment in the field as part of its strategy to modernize its military. Now, the coronavirus pandemic is showcasing the PLA's growing expertise in medical research, including a major role in developing the coronavirus vaccine that was the first in the world to be approved for restricted use.

Pakistan which has a population of 220 million has vaccinated over 2.5 million people. It had reported 834,146 confirmed cases with 18,149 deaths and 728,044 recoveries, reported Pakistan's National Command and Operation Center. So far there had been 834,146 confirmed cases with 18,149 deaths and 728,044 recoveries. Islamabad aims at vaccination of 70 million by the end of 2021The per day vaccination nearly 150,000 people, as per plan to start with, looking to raising it to 300,000 vaccinations a day on an average. Slightly over 1.3 million people, including health professionals and people above 50 years old are to be inoculated’.

In April, the concerned health authorities of Pakistan made it known that they would collaborate with China for manufacturing Covid 19 vaccine with the help of Chinese technology. Maj. Gen. Aamer Ikram, the head of the National Institute of Health briefed the parliament's health committee that China's single-dose CanSinoBio vaccine would be locally manufactured in no time and that China agreed to transfer the technology for the vaccine. The raw material of the vaccine arrived in Pakistan by April-end. In fact, Pakistan was among the first countries to take part in the clinical trial of China's CanSino vaccine. The NIH has procured all the equipment and chemicals needed.

Medical researcher Major General Chen Wei at the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology — part of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences — led the team that developed the vaccine, which included collaborators from government agencies, universities and the Tianjin-based pharmaceutical company CanSino Biologics.

In July last year, the team had a feather in its cap when one of the first in the world to publish results in a peer-reviewed journal, showing that a coronavirus vaccine would be safe and capable of eliciting an immune response 1. The Chinese government had already approved the vaccine, based on a common cold adenovirus and called Ad5-nCoV, for limited use in military personnel, before large-scale testing to prove its efficacy. Wei and members of her team were among the first — of thousands in the military so far — to receive the vaccine. Buy and the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology declined to not respond to Nature’s request for comment about the vaccine work.

CanSino was developed using a mechanism similar to a recombinant adenovirus vaccine developed by the UK company AstraZeneca and Oxford University than made headlines globally after the suspension of its final clinical trials because a participant in the UK had an unexplained illness..

But skeptics were not in scarcity. Abigail Coplin whose area os study is China’s biotechnology industry at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, quipped, “China is definitely trying to leverage the crisis from a PR perspective”.

Truly, with the WHO having ticked off the CanSino Biologics, China had an edge, especially over the USA. It indeed clocked a pretty big propaganda victory” for Beijing, rightly visualized by Adam Ni, a China analyst from the Australian National University in Canberra .China has been supplying its vaccine to a number of countries in Africa and Latin America. Now after the stoppage of Indian vaccine exports to a number of countries, China is trying to fill up the gap vacated by India. Right now, it is advantage china in vaccine diplomacy and Pakistan is a big beneficiary of that. (IPA Service)