India pins hopes on locally-tested COVID-19 vaccines

GBNEWS24 DESK//

India hopes five locally-tested vaccines will help it to control COVID-19, as those developed by Pfizer and Moderna may not be available to it in big quantities soon.

The five candidates include Russia’s Sputnik-V whose “Phase-II going to Phase-III” trials in India will start next week in collaboration with Dr Reddy’s Laboratories, Vinod Paul, the head of a committee advising the prime minister, said.

The other experimental vaccines are the one being developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University which is being manufactured by the Serum Institute of India; Bharat Biotech and the Indian government’s COVAXIN; Zydus Cadila’s ZyCoV-D and lastly one being developed by Biological E Ltd alongside Baylor College of Medicine and Dynavax Technologies Corp, reports Reuters.

Paul told a news briefing that AstraZeneca vaccine’s last-stage trials in India had gone well and had almost been completed. The country of 1.35 billion people has reported 8.87 million infections, second only to the United States, and 130,519 deaths as a result of COVID-19.

“We are very hopeful that we will be successful with the five vaccines,” Paul said on Tuesday. “They are easy platforms, availability of doses is very high. They will be able to control our pandemic in terms of the numbers of doses required.”