The World Health Organization has cleared a coronavirus vaccine made by the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac for emergency use, the agency announced on Tuesday.
The decision, which comes about a month after the agency authorized another Chinese vaccine, made by Sinopharm, for emergency use, means that Sinovac’s vaccine can potentially be included in Covax, a worldwide initiative to supply coronavirus vaccines to low-income countries.
There is dire need for vaccines in countries and regions where the virus is surging, like India, much of Southeast Asia and South America. Adding another vaccine to the distribution calculus could help meet that demand.
Sinovac’s vaccine, called CoronaVac, was developed using inactivated viruses, a technique that has been in use for over a century.
Clinical trials of CoronaVac in Brazil and Turkey delivered very different results, but both showed that the vaccine protected against Covid-19.
The vaccine has already been approved for use in 29 countries, including China, Brazil and Mexico, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford.
CoronaVac is administered in two doses over two to four weeks, and is easier to store than those from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which must be kept frozen for long-term storage.
The W.H.O. director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said at a news conference on Tuesday that the ease of storing CoronaVac made it very useful for the “low resource settings” that need it most.
So far, an overwhelming share of vaccine doses have gone to wealthy countries, and many of them are returning to an approximation of normal life while the virus devastates less prosperous nations.
“The world desperately needs multiple Covid-19 vaccines to address the huge access inequity across the globe,” Dr. Mariângela Simão, the W.H.O.’s assistant director general for access to health products, said in a statement.
At Tuesday’s news conference, Dr. Tedros and officials from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank Group and the World Trade Organization discussed a new push to secure $50 billion to step up manufacturing and distribution of coronavirus vaccines and other medical supplies and treatments to poorer countries.
“An increasingly two-track pandemic is causing a two-track economic recovery, with negative consequences for all countries,” said Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the I.M.F. “Our data shows that in the near term, vaccinating the world is the most effective way to boost global output. In other words, vaccine policy is economic policy.”
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