Hindustan Times - China and Sri Lanka are set to deepen their bilateral “vaccine diplomacy” with a leading Chinese pharma company preparing to set up a manufacturing plant to make anti-Covid jabs in President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s home district, Hambantota.

The new plant will be set up under an agreement that will allow Colombo to source nine million Covid-19 vaccine doses from the Chinese pharma company that sets it up, Sri Lankan ambassador to China, Palitha Kohona, told HT.

A deal between Sri Lanka’s State Pharmaceutical Corporation (SPC), a state-owned enterprise, and China’s Sinovac Biotech is “fairly close to completion,” Kohana said.

“It will be set up in the dedicated pharmaceutical manufacturing zone [in Hambantota],” the Sri Lankan envoy said.

The Sinovac vaccine is one of the two Chinese jabs approved by the World Health Organization (WHO) under its “emergency-use listing”; the other being from state-owned Sinopharm.

The development comes months after India gifted 500,000 doses of the Indian-made version of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Colombo, which kicked off Sri Lanka’s vaccine roll-out in late January.