India is one of the few countries in the world to isolate the novel coronavirus that had cause COVID-19. According to Dr M V Padma Srivastava, who is the chief of neurosciences at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), that it is on the pathway to develop one of the cheapest vaccines.

Dr Srivastava had volunteered for the third phase of trial for Covaxin last week, which is an indigenous vaccine developed by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) in association with Bharat Biotech. He said that he was the first to receive the Covaxin shot in AIIMS, Delhi, last Thursday. Another shot of the vaccine will be given after 28 days.

The 55-year-old doctor further said that she had not yet suffered any side-effect after the vaccine administration. There was a recent controversy that a participant in a trial for another COVID-19 vaccine had severe side-effects.

AIIMS is planning to enrol more than 1,000 volunteers for the 3rd phase of the Covaxin trials. Sources said that 40-50 volunteers have already registered and received the first shot of the indigenous COVID vaccine.

A senior doctor in the community medicine department, AIIMS said that the third phase of the trials will have above 26,000 participants throughout the country. It will be the most important stage of trials before the vaccine can be used for immunizing people against the coronavirus infection that has been afflicting the whole world for almost nine months.

The doctor revealed that the 1st and 2nd phase of the trials for Covaxin vaccineis completed and it had was well tolerated by the test participants.

Besides Covaxin, there are other vaccines for COVID also being developed. Among them are those by Pfizer-BioNTech, Oxford-AstraZeneca and Moderna. Covaxin is much cheaper unlike the other COVID vaccines, claimed the doctor at AIIMS. Also, storage and transportation will be easier for India as this vaccine can be stored at a temperature of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius. The other vaccines require very low storage and transport temperatures.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had visited the Bharat Biotech facility in Genome Valley at Hyderabad on Saturday. He congratulated the scientists who were involved in the vaccine development project for their improvement in this project.

Source: ET Healthworld