Hungary has authorized the use of China’s Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine, said Hungarian Chief Medical Officer Cecilia Muller on Friday. “Today the National Institute of Pharmacy and Nutrition gave its approval for the Sinopharm vaccine,” Muller told a briefing. Besides the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines acquired through the European Union, Hungary has also approved Russia’s Sputnik V and the British AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines.
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AstraZeneca plc/AB (LON: AZN) is a British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical company with its headquarters in Cambridge, United Kingdom and Södertälje, Sweden. Its R&D is concentrated in Cambridge in United Kingdom, Södertälje in Sweden, and Maryland and Toronto in North America.
BioNTech SE (NASDAQ: BNTX) is a German biotechnology company dedicated to the development and manufacture of active immunotherapies for a patient-specific approach to the treatment of serious diseases.
China is the third largest country in the world by area and the largest country in the world by population. Properly known as the People’s Republic of China, the political territory of the country includes Tibet and Hong Kong. The capital is Beijing.
Covid-19 is the official WHO name given to the novel coronavirus which broke out in late 2019 and began to spread in the early months of 2020.
Symptoms of coronavirus
The main symptoms of coronavirus are:
a persistent new cough (non productive, dry)
a high temperature (e.g. head feels warm to the touch)
shortness of breath (if this is abnormal for the individual, or increased)
Latest News about Covid-19
Below are stories from around the globe related to the 2020 outbreak of novel Coronavirus – since the WHO gave the Covid-19 naming. Most recent items are posted nearest the top.
The European Union (EU) is a political and economic union of 27 member states that are located primarily in Europe. Its members have a combined area of 4,233,255.3 km² and an estimated total population of about 447 million.
Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Its capital, Budapest, is bisected by the Danube River. Its cityscape is studded with architectural landmarks from Buda’s medieval Castle Hill and grand neoclassical buildings along Pest’s Andrássy Avenue to the 19th-century Chain Bridge. Turkish and Roman influence on Hungarian culture includes the popularity of mineral spas, including at thermal Lake Hévíz.
Moderna is an American biotechnology company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that focuses on drug discovery, drug development, and vaccine technologies based exclusively on messenger RNA.
Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE) is an American multinational pharmaceutical corporation headquartered in New York City. In 2012, it was one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies and ranked 57 on the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.
Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country located in Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east, and from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea in the south.
Russia spans more than one-eighth of the Earth’s inhabited land area, stretching eleven time zones, and bordering 16 sovereign nations. Moscow is the country’s capital.
The Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 and since 1993 Russia been governed as a federal semi-presidential republic. Russia is a major great power, with the world’s second-most powerful military, and the fourth-highest military expenditure. As a recognised nuclear-weapon state, the country possesses the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons.
China National Pharmaceutical Group Corp. known as Sinopharm is a Chinese state-owned enterprise. The corporation was the indirect major shareholder of publicly traded companies Sinopharm Group, China Traditional Chinese Medicine. Shanghai Shyndec Pharmaceutical and Beijing Tiantan Biological Products.
Gam-COVID-Vac, trade-named Sputnik V, is a COVID-19 vaccine developed by the Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology, and registered on 11 August 2020 by the Russian Ministry of Health. It has been approved for distribution in Russia.
The phase III trial for Gam-COVID-Vac was registered on 28 August 2020, and is a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multi-centre clinical trial involving 40,000 volunteers. The phase III trial is scheduled to run until May 2021.
On 5 December 2020, Russia began mass vaccinations in Moscow, with 70 clinics inoculating those most at risk from the virus. Health workers and teachers were said to have priority in the first mass immunisation programme. People who had received injections in the last 30 days or had respiratory diseases in the previous two weeks were excluded, as well as those with certain chronic illnesses, and pregnant and breastfeeding women.
A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious disease. A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins, or one of its surface proteins.