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India is at the center of global efforts to produce a Covid vaccine, writes Hannah Ellis-Petersen of The Guardian.
As the world’s largest supplier of medicines and producer of 60% of the world’s vaccines, India has long been known as the ‘world’s pharmacy’.
Now, as the frantic search for a Covid-19 vaccine gathers momentum, the country is playing an increasingly strategic and central role in the development, manufacturing, and most importantly, the possible future distribution of various potential injections of Covid.
With more than 7.5 million cases and some 115,000 deaths, India is also one of the countries most affected by the virus, second only to the United States.
An agreement has already been reached for the Serum Institute of India, based in the city of Pune, to produce one billion doses of the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine, considered the forerunner in the vaccine race. In anticipation of its success, it has already started the production of nearly 2 million samples of the vaccine and is conducting phase 3 human clinical trials on thousands of patients spread across 15 Covid-19 hotspots in India.
This week, the Serum Institute of India said it was confident that the AstraZeneca vaccine would be ready by December and would be licensed for distribution in India in March.
Adar Poonawalla, executive director of the Serum Institute of India, said he was “very optimistic” that more than one successful vaccine was imminent.
“A lot of the data that I have seen unofficially on many of these vaccines is very promising and more than three or four vaccines will be successful very soon in the next year,” Poonawalla said.
The Serum Institute, which this week also began human trials with an intranasal Covid vaccine, is just one of dozens of Indian companies in the race to produce the highly coveted vaccine, nearly 200 different types of which are being developed across the world. the world. .
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