India fast tracks vaccine approvals – readies for action

NEW DELHI–India’s crisis authorization of 2 Covid-19 vaccines across the weekend strikes a gigantic and logistically daunting  inoculation effort in the planet’s second-most-populous country, in which the new coronavirus has killed over 150,000 and ravaged the market.

The purpose is to vaccinate over 300 million of the nation’s 1.3 billion people from the middle of this calendar year, employing an army of physicians, nurses, police officers, soldiers and other people to deliver and manage doses throughout the nation, by remote Himalayan villages to megacities such as Mumbai.

“It is going to be the greatest vaccination program on the planet,” explained Giridhara R. Babu, an epidemiologist in the Indian Institute of Public Health at Bangalore. “India has got the facilities and skills to make it happen.”

On Saturday, India’s drug regulators gave the green light to emergency use of a vaccine made from the University of Oxford and also AstraZeneca PLC that’s currently being mass produced and stockpiled in the country.

They also approved a vaccine made by Indian manufacturer Bharat Biotech, stating the Hyderabad-based company’s vaccine, which is in late-stage clinical trials, was safe and generated a strong immune response in people who received it. This move though, is being criticised by many as not being data driven.

Authorities said they’d given it special consent in areas to make sure India has different options in case the virus mutates in a way that renders some vaccines ineffective.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the approvals indicated”a critical turning point” in India’s struggle with the virus, and this, as well as sickening and killing large amounts, also led to a contraction in economic outcome of over 15% year-over-year in the six months ended Sept. 30.