(Bloomberg) -- Turkey approved its locally-made Turkovac Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use and said the first supplies of the shot will be delivered to public hospitals by the end of the year.
Appearing in a live video conference with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said mass production of the vaccine had started at a facility in Sanliurfa, with some final tests expected to take about a week.
The vaccine was developed in cooperation with Kayseri Erciyes University and Health Institutes of Turkey. Phase 3 human trials began in June.
Turkovac uses inactivated viruses to boost immunity, rather than the messenger RNA technology that's the basis of inoculations made by Pfizer-BioNTech SE and Moderna Inc. No data on the shot's efficacy have been released publicly.
Erdogan promised to send 15 million doses of the Turkish vaccine to African countries at a summit in Istanbul over the weekend. Koca last month pledged to provide 10 million doses to the international Covax facility.
Turkey had sent medical equipment and masks to “160 countries and 12 international institutions during the pandemic,” Erdogan said. “We'll be happy to share our vaccine with humanity.”
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As omicron spreads, teams around the world are racing to adapt their vaccines to provide better protection against the 30 mutations in the latest Covid strain. Turkey is one of 9 countries to develop vaccines against Covid-19.
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