NEW DELHI: Two more vaccines for the COVID-19 and a new pill to treat people with mild-to-moderate symptoms were approved by Drugs Controller General of India on Tuesday, December 29, bolstering the country’s tools to combat the pandemic at a time when fears are growing that the new Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 could spark a new wave.
The news came right after the announcement for expanding vaccination drive to cover children aged 15 and above, starting from January 2022. India now has eight COVID-19 vaccines approved for emergency use, including Serum Institute’s (SII) Covishield, Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin, Zydus’s ZyCoV-D, Russia’s Sputnik V, and Moderna and Johnson & Johnson dosages. To be sure, only Covishied, Covaxin, and Sputnik have been administered, so far. Covovax by SII has a license to produce around two billion doses with an efficacy rate of 90% in curbing symptomatic infection. Corbevax on the other hand is being manufactured by Biological E, under a partnership with Texas-based Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital Centre for Vaccine Development. Besides this, an anti-viral drug Molnupiravir has also been approved with similar prescriptions as the vaccines. “The more options we have, the better; and when it comes to vaccines, indigenous vaccines will undoubtedly have a storage and transit advantage over other vaccines. We now have five vaccines manufactured in India, three of which are WHO-approved, which is fantastic”, said Dr Sandeep Budhiraja, Group Medical Director, Max Healthcare and Senior Director at the Institute of Internal Medicine.