Sinovac Biotech

The US biotech company is alleging that mRNA technology it developed before the pandemic was copied

Health Minister Fahrettin Koca has announced that he has tested positive for COVID-19, in a latest social media post.

Koca said he tested positive for coronavirus five days ago and affirmed that he will continue to work on the recent regulation on health workers' rights via online meetings.

"Soon, I will be among my friends," the minister said.

The next three months will be crucial for efforts to confront challenges from the Omicron strain of COVID-19, a health expert has said, calling for speeding up the drive to give booster shoots.

Health Minister Fahrettin Koca last week announced the first cases of the Omicron variant in Turkey.

Turkey has donated 200,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines to Burkina Faso and Togo, two Western African countries where the effects of the pandemic have had more troubling consequences than the rest of the world, in a campaign by the Organization of Turkic States.

The sanitary regulator of Brazil suspended the use of just over 12.1 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine manufactured by the Chinese company Sinovac after knowing that the vials containing the vaccines were filled on an unauthorized production base.

Brazil's federal health regulator Anvisa on Sept. 4 suspended the use of over 12 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine developed by China's Sinovac Biotech Ltd that were produced in an unauthorized plant, it said in a statement.

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered officials to wage a tougher epidemic prevention campaign in "our style" after he turned down some foreign COVID-19 vaccines offered via the U.N.-backed immunization program.

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Turkey began administering its national coronavirus vaccine candidate to volunteers on Aug. 25 in the Central Anatolian province of Kayseri as part of Phase 3 studies.

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The inactivated Turkovac vaccine candidate was jointly developed by the Health Ministry, Health Institutes of Turkey, and Erciyes University (ERU).

Turkey has started to administer its homegrown COVID-19 vaccine candidate to volunteers at a major hospital in the capital Ankara as part of the jab's Phase 3 clinical trials to compare its efficacy to that of the Chinese-developed CoronaVac shot, the country's top health official announced on July 16. 

People who receive a COVID vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech produce 10 times more antibodies than those who opted for Sinovac's CoronaVac, a Chinese drug. This was reported on Friday, July 16 by South China Morning Post with reference to relevant research.