ISLAMABAD: Minister for Planning and Development Asad Umar has appealed to all frontline healthcare workers to register to receive the vaccine which the government said would be given free to all in the country.
Pakistan began its Covid-19 vaccine drive on February 2, with more than 400,000 doctors and frontline healthcare workers, teachers, and social workers receiving the shots in the first phase because they run the highest risk of exposure to the contagious disease.
After that, the shots will be provided to citizens over the age of 65, who generally face a higher mortality risk from the virus.
Asad, as per a statement issued by the National Command and Operations Centre (NCOC), said that the government will take every measure to ensure the safety of medics. “Frontline workers are our priority,” said the minister, who also heads the NCOC.
Cases have come down in recent months. In the last 24 hours, the nation documented 1,165 fresh infections of the coronavirus after conducting 33,196 tests, receiving back a transmission rate of 3.51 per cent.
Despite passing through two waves of Covid-19, Pakistan has yet to fully utilise its testing capacity of 59,981, with daily testing significantly below numbers proposed by global health experts.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the country’s testing policies only record the most symptomatic patients — a belief substantiated by a Punjab government official as the “most efficient use of resources.”
Pakistan received its first tranche of the Sinopharm jabs, given by China as a “gift”, earlier this month. The shipment marked the first shots to be imported into the country where more than 565,989 cases of the disease have been reported since the outbreak in February last.
In addition, the government is due to receive a further 1.1 million doses of the Sinopharm vaccine by the end of this month, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi had announced last month.
Separately, Special Assistant to Prime Minister on National Health Services Dr Faisal Sultan announced that the government has secured 17 million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine through the WHO’s COVAX initiative. Of these, he said, about seven million doses will be available in the first quarter of the year and the rest by the end of 2021.
COVAX is a global program to vaccinate people in poor and middle-income countries against the pandemic. The plan aims to deliver at least two billion free vaccine doses by the end of 2021 to cover 20 per cent of the most vulnerable people in more than 90 nations across the globe.
Moreover, the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) has granted ‘emergency use approval’ to the CanSinoBIO Recombinant Covid-19 Vaccine Adenovirus Type 5 Vector (the “Ad5-nCoV”) and its marketing through the private and public sector.
According to an official of DRAP, the approval has been granted following the communication of the results of the interim analysis of the global phase III clinical trial of Ad5-nCoV to the Health Ministry by the Independent Data Monitoring Committee (IDMC).
He said that the “Ad5-nCoV” has successfully met its pre-specified primary safety and efficacy criteria in the interim analysis. There were no vaccine-related serious adverse events (SAE) and therefore CanSinoBIO has been allowed by IDMC to continue to advance the global phase III clinical trial of the Ad5-nCoV.
The final CanSino Biologics Inc.’s experimental coronavirus vaccine stage clinical trial had an efficacy rate of 65.7 per cent at preventing symptomatic cases based on an analysis of 30,000 global participants adding a one-shot candidate to the world’s growing arsenal against Covid-19. And it was 90.98 per cent effective in preventing severe disease.
In the Pakistan subset, efficacy at preventing symptomatic cases is 74.8 per cent and 100 per cent at preventing severe disease. A vaccine needs to afford at least a 50 per cent protection rate to be considered effective, as mandated by the world’s leading drug regulators and the World Health Organisation (WHO).
This phase III clinical trial of Ad5-nCoV is a global multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, and adaptive designed phase clinical trials are being conducted to evaluate the efficacy, safety and immunogenicity of the Ad5-nCoV in adults over 18 years of age.
All participants received a single dose of either Ad5-nCoV or a placebo vaccine on Day 0 and followed to monitor vaccine candidate efficacy and incidence of SAE for a duration of 52 weeks.
The primary efficacy objective is the efficacy of Ad5-nCoV in preventing virologically confirmed (PCR positive) symptomatic Covid-19 disease, regardless of severity, occurring 28 days to 52 weeks after vaccination.
Covid-19 disease rates in Ad5-nCoV group are compared with Covid-19 rates in the control group. The primary safety objective is to evaluate the incidence of SAE and medically attended adverse events within 52 weeks after vaccination in all participants.
The phase III clinical trial of Ad5-nCoV, part of the multi-country multi-centre clinical trial being conducted by CanSinoBIO, was initiated in Pakistan on September 22, 2020. Later the study was extended to Mexico, Russia, Argentina and Chile.
CanSinoBIO has agreed to supply 35 million doses to Mexico while Malaysia is in talks to get 3.5 million shots. In June 2020 the vaccine was used in China for immunizing its military following its Emergency Use Approval in China.
