NEW DELHI – India has approved Oxford University’s Covid-19 vaccine and AstraZeneca PLC, which will launch worldwide use of a vaccine expected to be accepted by developing countries, given the lower price and ease of transport in compared to other front-runners.
Indian Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar said on Saturday that the vaccine, which was developed in the UK, had been approved for emergency use.
‘Last year started with corona. This year started with a vaccine, ‘he said at a news conference in New Delhi on Saturday.
The UK approved the vaccine earlier this week, and India is one of the first countries to follow suit.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine may well suit India and other developing countries thanks to its price, convenience and expected global reach. AstraZeneca has promised to make as many as three billion doses available by 2021 – more than any other Covid-19 vaccine manufacturer – and at a cheaper price.
A soft waiting area was set up on January 2 during a dry run in a vaccination center in New Delhi.
Photo:
rajat gupta / Shutterstock
The British company says it will not benefit from the shot during the pandemic, or ever in the case of poorer countries.
The vaccine can be transported and stored for months with normal refrigeration, making it easier to distribute in places where people and healthcare networks exceed and are underfunded. Many of the other leading Western vaccines require ultra-cold temperatures for just a few days or weeks.
India has already built up its vaccine delivery network and took a dry run in some states over the weekend to test it. Its first vaccination wave will, after all, penetrate its nationwide child vaccination network, which is one of the largest in the world. This network reaches the entire South Asian country, but does not yet have the freezers or transport equipment available to handle the vaccines that require extremely cold temperatures.
In India, AstraZeneca has a production and distribution agreement with the Serum Institute of India to deliver more than one billion doses to developing countries. The institute is already the largest producer of vaccines in the world and delivers more than a billion doses per year for everything from polio to measles, mostly for export to emerging markets.
Trusting that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will get approval, SII has made and stored it and is already ready for nearly 50 million doses. It has not yet been said how much it would be for India, but in the past he said it would eventually expect about half of the production to be for domestic use.
Although the early approval of India and the stock of the Serum Institute will speed up the process, a nationwide implementation will still take time. Richer, less populated countries are already struggling with logistics. India plans to deliver more than 300 million doses in the next six months to make a dent in the population of more than 1.3 billion people.
The vaccine takes two shots, and British health officials recommend a delay of as long as three months between each dose. Similar guidelines apply to the vaccines developed by Pfizer Inc.
and BioNTech SE which the UK approved earlier in December. The Pfizer-BioNTech survey and one developed by Moderna Inc.
was also cleaned in the US
India needs an affordable, easily distributed vaccine, as it has been confirmed that more than 10 million Indians are infected, the second in the United States. While its daily infection rate has dropped over the past few months, it is still getting about 20,000 new infections and more than 200 deaths every day.
Meanwhile, India’s gross domestic product shrank by more than 15% during the six months to September compared to a year earlier. The government wants a vaccine to end the fear of the coronavirus and restore the economy to create more and better jobs for its young population.
Write to Vibhuti Agarwal at [email protected] and Eric Bellman at [email protected]
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