Five out of six vaccines under the National Covid-19 Immunisation Program have been endorsed by the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Emergency Use Listing (EUL). These include Sinovac and Sinopharm, the latest Covid-19 vaccines to be included.

The EUL currently has seven Covid-19 vaccines approved for emergency use and they include Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Covishield, Johonson & Johnson and Moderna. In May WHO added Sinopharm to the EUL listing followed by Sinovac in June this year.

The EUL is a procedure for assessing unlicensed vaccines, therapeutics and in-vitro diagnostics during public health emergencies with the ultimate goal of expediting the availability of these products to people who need them.

The WHO’s EUL is a prerequisite for the Covax Facility vaccine supply and international procurement.  It allows countries to expedite their own regulatory approval to import and administer Covid-19 vaccines.

This means that only vaccines that are included in the EUL can be included in Covax, the global program that aims to provide Covid-19 vaccines mainly to developing nations.

So far the vaccines that have gained approval for Malaysia’s Covid-19 inoculation drive are those from Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Sinovac, Sinopharm, Johnson & Johnson and CanSino.

The efficacy results of Sinovac showed that the vaccine prevented symptomatic disease in 51 percent of those vaccinated and prevented severe Covid-19 and hospitalization in a 100 percent of the studied population.

As for Sinopharm, which received conditional approval for use in Malaysia the WHO stated it had a 79 percent efficacy rate against hospitalization.

-THE MALAYSIA VOICE