Chennai: India said it had no concerns over the efficacy of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine despite South Africa putting it on hold, and ordered 10 million more doses of the shot for its own huge immunisation campaign.South Africa delayed use of the vaccine after researchers found it offered minimal protection against mild-to-moderate Covid-19 disease caused by the country’s dominant coronavirus variant.
India, with the highest number of infections after the United States, has yet to detect the South African variant and will continue to use the vaccine in an inoculation drive that has covered 6.3 million front-line workers since 16 January.
‘Our vaccination programme is robust and valid, and I assure you that we are going ahead with it, not worried at the moment’, Vinod Kumar Paul, a top vaccine official in the country, said.
‘We will intensify our surveillance and we will be watching other developments in due course’.
The SII has licensed the vaccine from AstraZeneca and Oxford University and markets it as Covishield for low-and middle-income countries.
India has ordered 10 million more doses of Covishield on top of 11 million supplied earlier, a SII spokesman said.
SII has agreed to sell atleast 100 million doses to the government at a discounted price of Rs 200 each.
Paul also said Johnson & Johnson could manufacture its shot in India. He also said many more vaccines, including Russia’s Sputnik V, Cadila Healthcare’s ZyCov-D and a Novavax product, were in the queue.
‘India is fortunate to have two great made-in-India vaccines, and as many as six-seven vaccines in the pipeline and perhaps many more’, he said, days after Pfizer Inc pulled an application seeking emergency-use authorisation in the country.