A ‘safe and effective’ coronavirus vaccine will be available to the general public in the country next May or June, said Adar Poonawalla, executive director of the Serum Institute of India at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit 2020. 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.
The drug manufacturer may apply for the emergency authorization of COVID-19 vaccine from Oxford in India. Then the COVID-19 vaccine will be available in December for essential workers, Poonawalla said. However, the decision will depend on the outcome of the trial, said the executive director of the Serum Institute of India.
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 strong immune response in older adults.
“We were pleased to see that our vaccine was not only well tolerated in older adults; it also stimulated immune responses similar to those seen in younger volunteers. The next step will be to see if this translates into protection against the disease itself, ” said Maheshi Ramasamy, Oxford Vaccine Group researcher and consultant physician.
The vaccine also produced a dual immune response in people ages 18 to 55, according to the previous report.
The Serum Institute of India plans to produce 100 million doses of vaccines by February 2021. The vaccine has a cost ₹500- ₹600 for citizens of India.
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.
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