(Yicai Global) Sept. 24 -- The chairman of China National Biotec Group, whose Covid-19 vaccines have entered the final leg of phase III clinical tests, proposed that China introduce policy safeguards to speed the approval of experimental coronavirus shots.

The country should expedite the appraisal process for Covid-19 vaccines that are set to debut on the market and begin their use by key groups, Yang Xiaoming said at the 13th China Bioindustry Convention in Wuhan today.

China is pushing ahead with developing an inoculation based on five types of technology and has 11 vaccines in human trials, three of them in phase III, Science and Technology Minister Wang Zhigang said on Sept. 18. One of these could be available to the public as early as November, an official at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said on Sept. 15.

Trials of Beijing-based CNBG's two inactivated Covid-19 jabs are ongoing in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Peru, and Argentina, with nearly 50,000 participants worldwide as of Sept. 14.

Yang pointed out that after the novel coronavirus emerged, CNBG took just three months to develop its vaccines and spent another two setting up large workshops in Beijing and Wuhan. These can produce 300 million doses a year, which will increase to 1 billion a year, he added.

CNBG decided to go for inactivated vaccines because they have a long history in China, Yang said, which means they can be developed quickly and produced at scale.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Peter Thomas