Azerbaijan to hold booster shot trials for Turkovac

ISTANBUL

Phase 3 trials for the booster shots of Turkovac, Turkey’s locally developed vaccine against COVID-19, will be conducted in Azerbaijan, the Turkish Health Ministry has announced.

Under the clinical trials, which will be conducted jointly by the Health Institutes of Turkey (TÜSEB) and the Baku Health Center, Azerbaijani citizens, who have already received two doses of an inactivated vaccine, will be given a dose of Turkovac. People aged between 18 and 59 will take part in the trials.

A delegation from Turkey, including Professor Erhan Akdoğan, the head of TÜSEB and Professor Ateş Kara, the head of the Vaccine Institute of Turkey, will travel to Baku and the protocol regarding phase 3 trials will be signed on March 9, following which tests will commence.

Turkey is among the nine countries in the world that developed its own vaccine against coronavirus. The country rolled out the inactivated shot Turkovac, following regulatory approvals from local authorities for emergency use, in its inoculation drive in late December last year.

It is also giving the mRNA vaccine developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and the Chinese company Sinovac’s inactivated shot to its citizens.

Since it launched its inoculation program in January last year, Turkey has administered more than 146 million doses of the vaccine. Over 27 million people have been given a third dose, while around 53 million people, or 85 percent of the population aged 18 and above, have been double jabbed. Close to 58 million have received at least one dose of the vaccine to date, according to data from the Health Ministry.