Moscow – The Philippines will likely receive an approved COVID-19 vaccine for mass use in the second quarter of 2021, an official said.
Rowena Guevarra, the Undersecretary for Research and Development of the Philippine Department of Science and Technology, said this in Moscow on Wednesday.
“If we are talking about availability en masse, we believe this is going to be happening in the 2nd quarter of next year,” Guevarra said.
Guevara said that she was referring to several vaccines, including the ones from Russia, China’s Sinovac and those expected to be included in the World Health Organisation’s Solidarity Trial for vaccines.
The Philippines has so far confirmed 169,000 COVID-19 cases and more than 2,600 related deaths.
About 113,000 people have fully recovered from the disease.
With confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide surpassing 9 million and continuing to grow, scientists are pushing forward with efforts to develop vaccines and treatments to slow the pandemic and lessen the disease’s damage.
Some of the earliest treatments will likely be drugs that are already approved for other conditions, or have been tested on other viruses.
“People are looking into whether existing antivirals might work or whether new drugs could be developed to try to tackle the virus,” said Dr Bruce Y. Lee, a professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy.
Many of the drugs being developed or tested for COVID-19 are antivirals. These would target the virus in people who already have an infection.
(Sputnik/NAN)