CoronaVac vaccine 83.5 percent effective: Turkish study

Interim results from a phase 3 trial in Turkey have shown that two doses of CoronaVac, a vaccine developed by the Chinese firm Sinovac, are 83.5 percent effective against symptomatic COVID-19.

The phase 3 trials for the jab was conducted on more than 10,000 volunteers aged between 18 and 59 and the results of the study in which researches from 24 centers in Turkey participated was published in The Lancet on July 9.

Some 6,650 of those participants were given two doses of the vaccine 14 days apart, while 3,568 received a placebo between Sept. 14, 2020 and Jan. 5, 2021.

The study showed that the vaccine is 100 percent effective against severe cases and produced strong antibody response.

According to the research, most of the adverse effects of the vaccine were mild and occurred within seven days of an injection and no deaths were reported.

Turkey, which rolled out its massive vaccination program on Jan. 14, has been using both Sinovac's vaccine and the jab developed by Pfizer/BioNTech.

To date, the country has administered more than 56 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccines with over 37 million having received their first doses, or 60 percent of the population aged over 18, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca wrote on Twitter on July 9. Nearly 17 million people have been fully vaccinated.

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