NEW DELHI: India moved forward with work on its coronavirus vaccine, while Britain ‘s AstraZeneca It said its deliveries were being delayed “a bit” as countries around the world sought to conquer the pandemic and rescue their economies.
A vaccine It is considered the world’s best bet to tame a virus that has infected more than 48 million people, caused more than 1.2 million deaths, stirred economies and disrupted billions of lives since it was first identified time in China in December.
Australia is beefing up its potential arsenal against the pandemic to 135 million doses of various vaccine candidates.
“We are not putting all our eggs in one basket,” said the Prime Minister. Scott morrison he said Thursday.
About 45 vaccine The candidates are in human trials around the world, and Pfizer Inc said it could apply for U.S. clearance in late November, opening up the possibility of a vaccine be available in the United States by the end of the year.
Modern and AstraZeneca are far behind the largest US drug maker and will likely have preliminary data on their vaccine candidates before the end of the year.
An Indian government backed vaccine could launch in February, months earlier than expected, as late-stage testing begins this month and studies so far have shown it to be safe and effective, a senior government scientist he told Reuters.
Bharat Biotech, a private company that is developing COVAXIN with the government Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), had previously expected to release it only in the second quarter of next year.
“The vaccine it has shown good efficacy, “said ICMR lead scientist Rajni Kant, who is also a member of its Covid-19 working group, at the research body’s headquarters in New Delhi.
“It is expected that early next year, February or March, something will be available.”
Bharat Biotech could not be immediately reached.
A release in February would make COVAXIN the first vaccine to be implemented.
KEPT FROZEN VACCINE
AstraZeneca has signed multiple agreements to supply more than three billion doses of its candidate to countries around the world.
But a summer drop in British coronavirus infections had delayed test results, prompting the drugmaker to delay delivering injections to the government.
Britain’s vaccine chief said on Wednesday that it would receive just 4 million doses of the potential vaccine this year, against initial estimates of 30 million for Sept. 30.
AstraZeneca said Thursday that it was delaying deliveries while waiting for data from late-stage clinical trials to maximize the shelf life of supplies.
“We were a little late for deliveries, so vaccine it has been kept frozen, “CEO Pascal Soriot said on a conference call.
AstraZeneca and its partner in the project, the University of Oxford, said the data from the late-stage trials should land this year.
The United States leads the world in the number of deaths and infections from Covid and the pandemic was a polarizing issue in Tuesday’s presidential elections, in which the votes were still being counted.
Morrison from Australia said the government would buy 40 million doses of vaccines from Novavax and 10 million from Pfizer and BioNTech.
That is in addition to the 85 million doses Australia has already committed to purchasing from AstraZeneca and CSL Ltd in the event that the trials are successful.
Among other candidate vaccines around the world, a growing number of Russians are unwilling to be inoculated once the vaccine becomes widely available, the Levada Center, Russia’s only major independent pollster, said this week.
Russia, which is surprising in the West, is launching its “Sputnik V” vaccine for home use even though late-stage trials have not yet finished.
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