[fChk]

In my previous post, I was speaking in general terms but, yes, for COVID-19's vaccines, none of the currently advertised brands are officially approved by the WHO. The 2 US-made mRNA-based vaccines are approved by their local institutions (CDC, NIH etc..) under their emergency Act and they both passed the 3rd phase of their clinical-trials with an advertized 95% efficacy score. So is the Russian Sputnik V vaccine which is an adenovirus-based vector vaccine (technically similar to the one from Oxford-AstraZeneca.) The Russians did deploy their own vaccine -which was the first on the market- under the same emergency rule. The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is at its final stage, as they are manufacturing it in India and should be distributed worldwide to the countries seeking to purchase it.

The advantage of the adenovirus-based vector vaccine is that it doesn't require the highly low temperatures for preservation (5°C instead of -70°C for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for example) making it safer for distributions in 3rd-World countries. Also, there is the cost 3$ a shot instead of 50$ for either Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna ones.

Yesterday(/Feb. 15, 2021) the WHO approves the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use, because -as I hinted in that quote of mine above- it's cheaper and easier to distribute... making it ideal for use in the developing world (aka 3rd-World countries.)

To meet the demand Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine is currently produced in large-scale by AstraZeneca-SKBio in South Korea and the Serum Institute of India.

It should be noted however that the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine had few setbacks, including preliminary results showing its potential ineffectiveness with the South-African SARS-CoV-2 variant, which led its discontinuation in South Africa (according to some News, @deanhills might confirm this for us) and the decline to approve this vaccine in people 65+ without further study in Germany, France and South Korea.

The vaccination process itself consists of two doses with an interval of around 8 to 12 weeks.

On a personal note, we got this one already in deployment over here and curiously enough we've started with the elderly (70+ of age) along side the front-line workers... We'll see how it goes...