A drugmaker in China says it expects to begin domestic production of the BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine as soon as August, pending final approval from the country’s medicine regulator.

The Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group was scheduled to ink a joint venture agreement with the German vaccine maker this month and launch production in August, company chair Wu Yifang told shareholders on Friday.

“The overall progress of the examination and approval is being carried out in an orderly and normal manner, and communication with the National Medical Products Administration has also been very fast and effective. Now we are waiting for the final approval,” Wu said, referring to China’s drug administration agency.

He added that BioNTech’s experts had been holding daily meetings with Fosun at its factory in Jinshan district in Shanghai. Fosun previously said it could produce up to 1 billion doses a year.

Fosun is also in charge of the management, storage and distribution of BioNTech vaccines in Hong Kong, which is administering jabs that are jointly developed by BioNTech and American-based Pfizer, and manufactured in Germany.

Whether Hong Kong will import the Chinese-made BioNTech doses depends on future demand, says David Hui, a respiratory disease expert at the Chinese University. He believed that those to be produced in China would be just as safe, and should not trigger “unnecessary worries.”

Separately, close to 60% of COVID-19 patients in a recent outbreak in southern Guangzhou city thought they had only the normal flu, local medical authorities found.

Those patients said that despite symptoms of fever, coughing, headache and fatigue, they simply bought flu medicine and delayed seeking treatment or getting tested, the Guangzhou Disease Prevention and Control Center said on Saturday.

The Guangzhou outbreak, which began last month, is dominated by the highly transmissible Delta strain of the coronavirus. The strain was first detected in India and has a higher viral load and shorter incubation period. Higher viral loads are linked to worse COVID-19 outcomes.

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