Inside China's CoronaVac COVID-19 vaccine facility

BEIJING, Jan. 13 (Xinhua) -- Millions of people in China have received COVID-19 vaccine doses so far, with millions of doses also being sent overseas to help other countries in their fight against the virus.

One of the companies producing vaccines in China is Sinovac Biotech, which invited Xinhua to take a look at the production process inside its Beijing facility.

The efficacy of Sinovac's self-developed inactivated CoronaVac vaccine has been verified through phase one, two and three trials, with the company working consistently to develop the vaccine since the outbreak of COVID-19.

It takes around 40 days to produce each dose of vaccine, from making the solution to packaging it, involving around six steps.

As the virus has seen a recent resurgence in both China and the rest of the world, the company is increasing its production capacity to meet demand.

Every dose of vaccine has an individual code, which allows information such as its production date, current location, and date of use to be traced.

The vaccine has a shelf life of three years when stored between two to eight degrees Celsius, or 42 days when stored at 25 degrees.

CoronaVac has been exported to a number of countries so far, including Turkey and Brazil, while the Malaysian pharmaceutical company Pharmaniaga signed a contract with Sinovac earlier this week to receive 14 million doses.