Thousands of people already volunteer for Chinese virus vaccine

ANKARA

Thousands of citizens have already applied to take part in the tests for a candidate COVID-19 vaccine being developed by China, the country’s health minister has said.

The officials on Nov. 20 announced that applications from ordinary citizens would be collected from citizens for the Chinese jab, whose phase three trials on volunteer health workers began in mid-September in Turkey.

By the end of the day, 20,000 applications were collected from volunteer citizens, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said on Nov. 20.

“Thank you on behalf of 83 million [citizens],” Koca wrote on Twitter.

Turkey will soon sign a contract to buy at least 20 million doses of the candidate vaccine from China’s Sinovac Biotech, Koca said on Nov. 18, adding that Ankara was also in talks to buy doses of Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine.

“We will be able to procure at least 10 million doses of the Chinese vaccine in December. We want to increase this number. It will be just as much in January, too,” Koca said.

Turkey would become the second buyer of the Chinese vaccine after Brazil.

In an interview which was conducted a few weeks ago, Koca suggested that the first Chinese candidate vaccine would be applied in Turkey and that in the first two months of the vaccination the jab would be administered to around 5 million people from risk groups in the country, a columnist from daily Hürriyet said.

The vaccine will be administered free of charge in Turkey, Koca also said.