A Pakistani military aircraft carrying the shipment landed in the Pakistani capital Islamabad early on Monday, Pakistani health minister Dr. Faisal Sultan said, Aljazeera reported.
Sinopharm, a Chinese state-owned company, has developed one of two major Chinese vaccines to have been rolled out around the globe, alongside Sinovac’s Coronavac vaccine.
Phase three trials for the Chinese CanSino vaccine are also ongoing in Pakistan, which granted emergency use authorization for the Sinopharm, AstraZeneca, and Sputnik V vaccines last month.
Monday’s Sinopharm shipment marks the first vaccines to be imported into the South Asian country of 220 million people, where more than 546,000 cases of the coronavirus have been registered since the pandemic began. Pakistan is due to receive a further 1.1 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine from China by the end of this month, the country’s foreign minister said in January.
It was unclear whether those doses would be of the Sinopharm, Sinovac, or CanSino vaccine.
FA/PR