India can receive a COVID-19 vaccine by March 2021, revealed Dr. Suresh Jadhav, executive director of the Serum Institute of India. “India can receive COVID-19 vaccine by March 2021 as long as regulators notify processes quickly as various manufacturers are working on it,” Dr Jadhav said at the India Vaccine Accessibility Electronic Summit hosted by the HEAL Foundation in association with ICCIDD.
“India is moving rapidly towards vaccine development as two manufacturers are already in phase 3 testing and one in phase 2, while more players join the race” the Indian express he quoted Jadhav as saying. The Serum Institute of India can produce between 700 and 800 million doses of vaccines each year once things are optimized, he added.
The Pune-based drug maker has signed an agreement with British-Swedish company AstraZeneca to manufacture the COVID-19 candidate vaccine, developed by the University of Oxford. The final stage of Oxford’s COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial has already begun in the country.
Named AZD1222 or ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, the vaccine is a combined viral vector vaccine. It uses a weakened version of a chimpanzee common cold virus that encodes the instructions for making proteins from the new coronavirus to generate an immune response and prevent infection. The vaccine is likely to provide protection for about a year, AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said in June. According to a report published in the British medical journal, The lancet, the COVID-19 vaccine produced a dual immune response in people ages 18 to 55.
The Serum Institute of India will be ready with 60-70 million doses of vaccines by December 2020, but they will hit the market in 2021 after the approval of the license, added Dr. Jadav. Health workers should receive vaccinations first, followed by people over 60 with comorbidities and the rest of the population, he said.
“The end of the year target for the vaccine launch is a possibility, but there is absolutely no certainty about it because we need three things to happen,” Sarah Gilbert said previously.
Serum Institute of India will produce up to 200 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine for the poorest countries, including India, next year as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the GAVI vaccine alliance have doubled their funding, the company said. . The collaboration leads to an initial agreement signed in August by Serum, GAVI and the Gates Foundation for 100 million doses at a maximum price of $ 3 each.
The total funding provided is now $ 300 million, and the expanded collaboration also has an option for the provision of additional doses as needed.
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