Chennai: A senior scientist has said a vaccine for the coronavirus will likely be ready by early 2021 but rolling it out safely across India’s 1.3 billion people will be the country’s biggest challenge in fighting its surging epidemic.
Gagandeep Kang, professor of microbiology at the Vellore-based Christian Medical College and a member of the WHO’s Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety told Bloomberg that India, which is host to some of the front-runner vaccine clinical trials, currently has no local infrastructure in place to go beyond immunizing babies and pregnant women.
According to Kang, ‘By year-end we will have data that will tell us which vaccines are working and which ones are not going to do so well.’
‘If we get good results by year-end then we are looking at vaccines being potentially available in tiny numbers in first half of 2021 and larger numbers in the latter part,’ Kang added.