By the end of 2020, India is going to have a vaccine against Covid-19. Harsh Vardhan, Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare, said this on Saturday.
“I hope that if everything goes well, India will have access to a coronavirus vaccine by the end of 2020,” the minister tweeted later.
He also said that one of the three vaccine candidate against the deadly pandemic has already entered the third phase of the pre-clinical human trial.
Third phase of the trial has yielded encouraging results in the initial phases of its trial.
The remaining two vaccines are currently in Phase-I or II of their pre-clinical trials.
However, V.K. Paul, head of the national task force on Covid-19, refrained from revealing the names of the names of the vaccines. He only shared the details of the phases of clinical trials of different vaccines.
Although, V.K. Paul did not mention the name, but vaccine entering the third phase is most likely to be Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin. The vaccine is being developed with assistance from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).
India currently has three vaccine candidates for Covid-19 — ChAdOx1, developed by Oxford University and manufactured jointly by the Serum Institute of India (SII), Pune, and AstraZeneca; Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin, jointly developed with the Indian Council of Medical Research; and the third is ZycovD by Zydus Cadila.
The SII had earlier said of starting the Phase 2 trial of its Covid-19 vaccine this week.
