Centre makes big announcement over development of indigenous COVID-19 vaccine

The Centre on Sunday announced that Serum Institute of India (SII) and Bharat Biotech would soon begin the clinical trials of nasal coronavirus vaccine in India.

In a good news for millions of Indians, the Centre on Sunday (October 18) announced that Serum Institute of India (SII) and Bharat Biotech would soon begin the clinical trials of nasal coronavirus vaccine in India.

According to the Centre, the SII and Bharat Biotech will begin the trials of nasal coronavirus vaccine after receiving necessary regulatory approvals from the government.

Notably, curently there is no nasal trial coronavirus vaccine under trial in India. Bharat Biotech is already developing an indigenous Covid-19 vaccine in collaboration with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and for the trials of the coronavirus vaccine candidate it ha  entered into an agreement with Washington University and St. Louis University for the trials.

In his Sunday Samvaad on Sunday, Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said, "Bharat Biotech has entered into an agreement with Washington University's School of Medicine under which the company will conduct trials, produce and market an intranasal vaccine for the Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes coronavirus infection."

Harsh Vardhan added that SII and Bharat Biotech will soon begin the late-stage trials of a nasal coronavirus vaccine candidate in India. The Union Minister reamrked that thousands of participants are generally involved in the late-stage trial.

Few days ago, the Centre had announced that India would get a coronavirus vaccine in a few months. The government had also said that the process of delivering the coronavirus vaccine to people across the country would begin soon after the development of vaccine.

"We are very much into the vaccine development process...in the next few months at the most we should have a vaccine and in the next six months we should be in the process of delivering the vaccine to the people of India," Harsh Vardhan had said.