A vaccine for the coronavirus is likely to be ready in early 2021, but safely deploying it to India’s 1.3 billion people will be the country’s biggest challenge in fighting its growing epidemic, a leading vaccine scientist told Bloomberg.
India, which is home to some of the cutting-edge vaccine clinical trials, currently does not have a local infrastructure to go beyond vaccinating infants and pregnant women, said Gagandeep Kang, professor of microbiology at the Christian Medical College based in Vellore and member. of the WHO Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety.
The timing of vaccination is a controversial issue around the world. In the United States, President Donald Trump contradicted a senior administration health expert saying that a vaccine would be available in October. In India, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi had promised a native vaccine in mid-August, a claim that the government and its main medical research body have backtracked.
For a country of its size, and with a virus curve that shows no signs of flattening, a safe and rapid vaccine is a priority for the administration of Modi. The country’s broken health care system, already struggling to provide adequate care before the outbreak, cannot cope with the stress of a protracted pandemic. A strict lockdown implemented at the end of March caused the largest contraction among the major economies, with gross domestic product contracting 23.9% in the three months through June from the previous year.
“By the end of the year we will have data that will tell us which vaccines are working and which ones will not work as well,” said Kang, who until July headed the Indian government committee investigating potential indigenous vaccine candidates. we get good results by the end of the year, then we are looking at vaccines potentially being available in small quantities in the first half of 2021 and in larger quantities in the latter part. “
Kang said that any vaccine currently in phase three trials, whether made locally or from major Western pharmaceutical companies, has a 50% chance of success.
Immunization challenges
India is organizing clinical trials for all the major vaccine candidates. The Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, is conducting trials for the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford. Pharmacist Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories said last week that it will distribute the Russian vaccine in India after conducting final-stage human trials and receiving regulatory approval.
Native Indian vaccine developers Bharat Biotech International Ltd. are in the second phase human trial stage and Zydus Cadila is in the process of receiving approvals for third phase clinical trials.
Even after an effective vaccine becomes available, India will look to storage and delivery barriers as the outbreak intensifies in the interior of the country. The second most populous country in the world also has neither the experience nor the infrastructure for mass immunization in all age groups.
“We don’t have life cycle immunization structures, we don’t have a way to vaccinate the elderly who are a particular risk group here,” Kang said. “Just building the system to be able to immunize all ages is going to be a challenge.”
Data issues
Even as the South Asian nation scrambles to gain access to a reliable vaccine to control its fast-moving pandemic, its spotty testing strategy may end up underestimating the true scope of its outbreak.
India has increasingly relied on rapid antigen tests which can report false negatives up to 50% of the time and its daily test data does not specify which type of tests (antigen or polymerase chain reaction tests real-time most sensitive) – make up the total or whether they were performed in symptomatic or asymptomatic people, Kang said.
Despite pushing antigen testing, India’s 8% test positivity rate is far higher than the World Health Organization’s 5% benchmark for controlling the outbreak.
“It seems that in many places antigen and RT-PCR are used interchangeably. That doesn’t make sense to me, “he said.” It is difficult to know if the rate at which cases are increasing will accelerate when the testing strategy in different states is unknown. “
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