Turkey's first domestically-developed coronavirus vaccine Turkovac has taken another landmark step. The Health Ministry announced Tuesday that the jab would be the country's first vaccine to be used abroad when its clinical trials are held in Azerbaijan. Phase III trials of the vaccine, which received emergency approval in Turkey earlier, will be available for citizens of Azerbaijan as a third dose of the vaccine as part of its trials. Any citizen of the country, which is one of Turkey's closest allies, who were administered two doses of another inactive vaccine, will be eligible to participate in the trial.

The ministry said in a statement that the trial would be conducted in cooperation with Azerbaijan's Baku Health Center hospital in the Azerbaijani capital and The Presidency of Health Institutes of Turkey (TÜSEB), the main sponsor of Turkovac's development by a group of scientists from Erciyes University. A TÜSEB delegation, including its director professor Erhan Akdoğan, professor Ateş Kara, who heads Turkey's main vaccine institute and serves as a member of the Health Ministry's Coronavirus Scientific Advisory Board, were scheduled to travel to Baku to sign a protocol for trials on Wednesday.

The statement also said that efforts were underway for Turkovac's use abroad in other countries also but Azerbaijan was the first country to complete the preparations for trials. It said the vaccine would be available for any Azerbaijani citizen between the ages of 18 and 59 who were administered two doses of an inactive vaccine (whose last dose was administered at least 90 days ago) and those who were not infected with COVID-19 earlier.

Turkovac has seen huge interest from the Turkish public when it was included in the country's vaccination program last year. The program, which began in January 2021, also includes CoronaVac, another inactive vaccine developed by China's Sinovac, and a messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine developed by Pfizer-BioNTech. Authorities hope that the locally-made jab will boost the program. Since January 2021, more than 146 million doses were administered with the mass inoculation drive while the number of people who had their three doses of vaccine exceeded 27.3 million.

The vaccination is viewed as essential to break the cycle of infections in the pandemic, which soared to new highs last month before considerably decreasing in the past few weeks. The number of daily cases, which broke a record with over 100,000 in February, is back to around 30,000 nowadays. On Monday, the country reported 34,343 cases.

After reporting high figures last year, Azerbaijan also managed to curb the number of cases, which was only 149 as of Monday, with 13 fatalities. According to official figures by the Azerbaijani Health Ministry, more than 13 million doses were administered in the country against the coronavirus while more than 2.8 million doses were administered as booster shots.