Homegrown COVID Vaccine Now Available for Booster Jabs

Health authorities have authorized the use of Korea's first homegrown COVID-19 vaccine, SKYCovione, for booster shots from Monday.

The vaccine, which requires two jabs at an interval of about four weeks, had only been used to provide the initial two shots for adults since Sept. 5 but is now available for third and fourth jabs.

SKYCovione, or GBP510, was developed by SK Bioscience and the University of Washington's Institute for Protein Design.

But since many Koreans were already been vaccinated with other vaccines, the cumulative number of those who got SkyCovione stood at a mere 41 as of Sept. 16.

On Tuesday morning, the daily tally of new coronavirus infections stood at 47,917, bringing the cumulative number of COVID-19 cases in Korea to 24.46 million. As new infections are slowing, there are calls to lift the nominal indoor mask mandate completely.