NEW DELHI — India
approved a locally developed, needle-free, and nasally administered
COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use on Tuesday, in a boost to the country’s homegrown
pharmaceutical industry.
اضافة اعلان
The new
inoculation was developed by Bharat Biotech, the makers of another intravenous
vaccine that was greenlit by the World Health Organization last November.
India’s drug
regulator gave the new product emergency authorization on Tuesday, which will
allow it to be used as a primary dose by any unvaccinated or partially
vaccinated adult, but not as a booster.
“This step will
further strengthen our collective fight against the pandemic,”
health minister Mansukh Mandaviya said on Twitter.
Bharat Biotech
conducted third-phase trials in 14 sites around India and found that its safety
was “highly comparable” to other vaccines, the company said in a statement.
Development data
would be submitted to peer-reviewed journals and released publicly, the
statement added.
“Despite the
lack of demand for COVID-19 vaccines, we continued product development in intra
nasal vaccines to ensure that we are well prepared with platform technologies
for future infectious diseases,” Bharat Biotech chair Krishna Ella said.
It remains
unclear when the product will be available for public use, with the company
saying it would be rolled out in “due course”.
The announcement
comes two days after China launched the world’s first inhalable COVID vaccine,
Convidecia Air, which is administered through a nebulizer.
India was hit by
a devastating spike in
COVID cases last year that brought its health care
system close to collapse, with oxygen supplies running out and patients
struggling to source medicine from depleted pharmacies.
More than
200,000 people died within a few weeks, according to official figures, though
experts believe the real toll is several times higher.
India has since
administered more than two billion vaccine doses, fully inoculating more than
two-thirds of its 1.4 billion population.
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