China's Walvax to make COVID-19 vaccine candidate similar to AstraZeneca's - media

China's Walvax Biotechnology Co has started work on a plant to manufacture an early-stage coronavirus vaccine candidate similar to AstraZeneca PLC's product, state-backed media said on Sunday. Mass production for the proposed vaccine could begin in mid-2021, with an estimated capacity of 200 million doses a year, said Health Times, a paper run by the People's Daily. The treatment is based on a chimpanzee adenovirus to deliver materials that can trigger an immune response against the virus that causes COVID-19, a technique adopted in the candidate from AstraZeneca and Oxford University. The Chinese candidate, jointly developed by China's Tsinghua University and Tianjin Medical University, has not been tested on humans. The AstraZeneca-Oxford treatment is in final-stage large trials.