The World Health Organization on Friday approved the Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use — the first Chinese jab to receive the WHO’s green light.

The UN health agency signed off on the two-dose vaccine, which is already being deployed in dozens of countries around the world.

The WHO has already given emergency use listing to the vaccines being made by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, J&J, and the AstraZeneca jab being produced at sites in India and in South Korea.

“This afternoon, WHO gave emergency use listing to Sinopharm Beijing’s Covid-19 vaccine, making it the sixth vaccine to receive WHO validation for safety, efficacy and quality,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

The WHO recommended that the two Sinopharm shots be taken three to four weeks apart.

The vaccine’s efficacy for symptomatic and hospitalised cases of COVID-19 was estimated to be 79% when all age groups are combined, it said. The agency said few adults over 60 were enrolled in clinical trials of the vaccine, so its efficacy could not be estimated in that age group.