COVID-19 vaccine ready by end of year: Chinese pharmaceutical company

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Beijing: The head of a major state-owned Chinese pharmaceutical company said its coronavirus vaccine will be commercially available by the end of the year.

Liu Jingzhen, the chairman of SinoPharm, told a Chinese Communist Party newspaper that the vaccine would cost less than 1,000 yuan ($140) and be given in two shots, 28 days apart.

He said students and workers in major cities would need to get the vaccine, but not those living in sparsely populated rural areas.

"Not all of the 1.4 billion people in our country have to take it," he said in an interview published on Tuesday in the Guangming Daily.

SinoPharm, which has two vaccines in trial, has an annual manufacturing capacity of 220 million doses, Liu said.

Liu, who is also the company's Communist Party secretary, told the paper that he had been injected with the vaccine.

Reports that Chinese researchers and executives have received shots of their vaccines have raised ethical questions in some scientific circles.