Stocks surrendered some of the 2.5 per cent rally from Monday as concerns about the property debt crisis at Country Garden kept investors at bay. Sinopharm slumped on the first day as a Hang Seng Index member.

Sinopharm will be added to the Hang Seng Index next month after the latest quarterly review of Hong Kong’s stock benchmark, while property developer Country Garden will be removed after turning into a penny stock.

Experimental jab is similar to more effective foreign vaccines and is designed to target the Omicron variant.

State-owned drug maker says ‘hundreds of thousands’ of boxes of molnupiravir have arrived and more are being imported.

Some 500 Hongkongers have been recruited for clinical trial, out of which 100 have already received the new jabs.

Sun Yat-sen University research, which has not been peer-reviewed, suggests immune response cannot be endlessly boosted and there will be a ‘turning point’ after repeated vaccination.

Sahpra said the authorisation was ‘based on acceptable safety, quality and efficacy data’ from the July-December period.

Study authors caution that it’s still not clear how long the effects of the boosters will last.

Antibodies from the vaccines decline but T-cells still appear to go into action, health body’s incident manager says.

The jab shows significantly weaker neutralising activity against the variant than against an older strain, researchers say.

Researchers from the University of Washington and Humabs BioMed investigated how Omicron might escape immunity from past infections or vaccination.

SAGE says extra dose is not a booster shot but an extension of the main vaccination course.

The data was released as a fresh cluster of cases in primary school children has intensified the debate about vaccinating under-12s.

It is being developed to provide protection against Delta and Beta strains, and clinical trials of a booster shot are also under way, CNBG vice-president says.

Emergency use authorisation comes after clinical trials and extensive evaluations, just weeks following China’s expansion of its vaccination drive to under-18s.

Only 1 per cent of Vietnam’s population has received at least one vaccine dose, trailing the efforts of poorer neighbours like Cambodia and Laos.

Interim phase 3 results suggest two products have efficacy above 70 per cent for symptomatic cases but there is little data on elderly and vulnerable groups.

United Arab Emirates and Bahrain say they will provide a third shot of the Chinese Covid-19 vaccine to people who completed the two-dose regimen six months ago.

The United Arab Emirates appears to be the first country worldwide to formally introduce such booster shots; move comes amid concerns about insufficient antibody response.

The green light given to Sinopharm comes more than four months after the WHO handed out its first emergency use listing for a Covid-19 vaccine to US pharmaceutical company Pfizer and German company BioNTech.

After Sinovac and AstraZeneca, Sinopharm is the third company to have its vaccine approved by Indonesia.

Gulf Pharmaceutical Industries PSC said on Sunday it signed a contract to start manufacturing the vaccine from April.

Sinopharm Holding was ready to deliver the Covid-19 vaccines needed to meet Beijing’s target of more than 500 million vaccinations by June this year, its president said.

Elsewhere, Taiwan will form its first travel bubble of the pandemic with the tiny Pacific nation of Palau, and Japan is to lift a state of emergency in the Tokyo area.

Wuhan unit of state-owned Sinopharm, whose first vaccine was approved for general use in December, says second product has an efficacy rate of 72.5 per cent.

‘This is an important day as we begin inoculations with the Chinese vaccines,’ Prime Minister Orban says.

Work is also under way on a third jab using different technology that would be easier to scale up, company chairman says.

The vaccines, enough to protect 275,000 people against Covid-19, were flown in aboard a Hungarian government plane from Beijing.