Covaxin, India’s indigenous vaccine against COVID-19, may provide better protection against the Omicron variant, said experts.

K Srinath Reddy, president of Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), said that inactivated vaccines, such as Covaxin, have a relatively wider exposure because they use the full virus, having many antigens. He said that the chance of some immune escape from vaccines is there because most of the vaccines are directed only against the spike protein. He asked for laboratory and clinical tests to determine how the new variant, with the highest number of mutations in the spike protein among all the variants, behaves with the vaccines.

Head of epidemiology and infectious diseases at the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), Samiran Panda, said that scientific estimates would suggest that Covaxin could possibly be more effective… (ET Healthworld, December 2, 2021)