Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a meeting on Friday to review India’s vaccination strategy in which issues such as prioritization of population groups and the technological platform for the deployment of the vaccine for the coronavirus
were discussed.
Modi tweeted that the meeting discussed important topics related to the progress of vaccine development, regulatory approvals and procurement.
“Several topics were reviewed such as prioritizing population groups, approaching TS (health workers), increasing the cold chain infrastructure, adding vaccines and a technological platform for the deployment of vaccines “, said. A number of COVID-19 vaccine candidates are in advanced stages of testing.
The key meeting comes on a day when the director of the Indian company hired manufacturing COVID-19 The vaccine said it could deliver it to Indian healthcare workers and elderly people in January as the country’s number of infection cases topped nine million on Friday.
The Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, has already manufactured millions of doses of the vaccine that is being developed in collaboration with the University of Oxford while waiting for results from late-stage trials.
Britain-based AstraZeneca has signed several supply and manufacturing agreements with companies and governments around the world.
On Thursday, data published in the medical journal The Lancet showed that the AstraZeneca vaccine produced a strong immune response in older adults, and the researchers expected to publish the results of the late-stage trial by Christmas.
Drug makers Pfizer and Moderna have also published late-stage trial data showing more than 90% efficacy in their vaccine candidates.
India is watching the progress of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, but availability and supply could be a problem with a population as large as India, the head of a committee advising the prime minister said this week.
Adar Poonawalla, SII Chief Executive Officer, said his company will seek emergency use authorization for the AstraZeneca vaccine as soon as it is approved by UK authorities and made available to the general public.
“It has been a Herculean task and we are very happy now that we are almost now on automatic pilot waiting for the results of the vaccine to come in,” Poonawalla said at a conference Thursday. “Then we can produce hundreds of millions more of the vaccine.”
The vaccine would be priced between Rs 500 and Rs 600 on the retail market, but the Indian government would get it for much less because they would buy it in bulk, Poonawalla said.
(With PTI inputs)
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