China has granted “conditional” market approval to a Sinopharm vaccine with a reported 79 percent efficacy rate against Covid-19, health authorities said Thursday, a major stride towards inoculating the world’s largest population.
A conditional listing helps hustle emergency drugs to market in cases when clinical trials are yet to meet normal standards but indicate they will work. But China faces the unprecedented challenge of getting vaccines to a population of more than 1.3 billion people. As a winter wave of virus infections batters much of the world, spurring fresh lockdowns and grim spikes in death tolls, attention has returned to China’s management of the pandemic.