The World Health Organisation says it has approved a COVID-19 vaccine from China's state-owned drug maker Sinopharm for emergency use.
The vaccine is one of two main Chinese shots that collectively have already been given to hundreds of millions of people in China and abroad.
It is the first time the WHO has given emergency use approval to a Chinese vaccine for any infectious disease.
Sinopharm has released very little data publicly, aside from efficacy numbers for its two vaccine shots - one developed by its Beijing Institute of Biological Products and the other by the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products.
The Beijing shot is one that was considered by WHO for the emergency use listing.
"This afternoon, WHO gave emergency use listing to sign off on Beijing's COVID-19 vaccine," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhahom Ghebreysus said.
A separate group advising the UN agency on vaccines said it was "very confident" the Sinopharm vaccine protects people ages 18-59.
The group said it had a "low level of confidence" of the vaccine's efficacy in people 60 and over.
Its members said they had "very low confidence" in the available data about serious side effects in that age group.
A WHO emergency listing is a signal to regulators of individual countries on a product's safety and efficacy and would allow the shot to be included in COVAX, the global program to provide vaccines mainly for poor countries.
The WHO has previously given emergency approval to COVID-19 vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and, last week, Moderna.
