Vacid-19 Vaccine Made by AstraZeneca, Oxford is Authorized by India

“Last year started with a corona. This year it started with a vaccine, ”he said at a news conference in New Delhi on Saturday.

The UK authorized the vaccine earlier this week, and India is one of the first countries to follow suit.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine may be a good option for India and other developing countries thanks to its price, convenience and expected global reach. AstraZeneca has promised to make up to three billion doses available in 2021 – more than any other vaccine manufacturer Covid-19 – and at a cheaper price.

The British company says it will not profit from the injection during the pandemic, nor in the case of the poorest 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 are overloaded and without resources. Many of the other major Western vaccines require ultracold temperatures for everyone except a few days or weeks.

India is already building its vaccine distribution network and over the weekend ran a simulation in some states to test it. Its first wave of vaccinations will be based on its national child vaccination network, one of the largest in the world. This network reaches the entire South Asian country, but does not have the freezers or transport equipment needed to handle vaccines that require extremely low temperatures readily available.

In India, AstraZeneca has a manufacturing and distribution agreement with the Serum Institute of India to supply more than one billion doses to developing countries. The institute is already the world’s largest manufacturer of vaccines by volume, producing more than one billion doses a year for everything from polio to measles, mainly for export to emerging markets.

Confident that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine would be approved, SII is manufacturing and storing it and already has about 50 million doses ready. He did not say how much it would be for India, but in the past he said he expected about half of his production to be for domestic use.

Although India’s early approval and Serum Institute inventory accelerate the process, implementation across the country will still take time. Wealthier and less populous countries are already struggling with logistics. India plans to deliver more than 300 million doses in the next six months, to start decreasing its population of more than 1.3 billion people.

The vaccine takes two injections and British health officials recommend a delay of up to three months between each dose. Similar guidance applies to vaccines developed by Pfizer Inc.

and BioNTech SE that the UK authorized in early December. The Pfizer-BioNTech shot is one developed by Moderna Inc.

were also released in the USA

India needs a vaccine that is affordable and easy to distribute, as more than 10 million Indians have been confirmed as infected, second only to the United States. Although its daily infection rate has plummeted in the past few months, it is still having about 20,000 new infections and more than 200 deaths per day.

Meanwhile, in the six months to September, India’s gross domestic product contracted more than 15% over the previous year. The government wants a vaccine to end the fear of the coronavirus and allow the economy to recover to create more and better jobs for its young population.

Write to Vibhuti Agarwal at [email protected] and Eric Bellman at [email protected]