Source: AL JAZEERA

Co­v­ax­in, the first COVID-19 vac­cine de­vel­oped in In­dia, is “high­ly ef­fi­ca­cious” and presents no safe­ty con­cerns, ac­cord­ing to a study pub­lished in the med­ical jour­nal Lancet.

Co­v­ax­in gained emer­gency ap­proval from the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion last week, the eighth jab to be giv­en the green light by the health body. The vac­cine has al­ready been cleared for use in 17 coun­tries.

Known by the code BBV152, Co­v­ax­in is an in­ac­ti­vat­ed virus-based COVID-19 vac­cine de­vel­oped by Bharat Biotech in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the In­di­an Coun­cil of Med­ical Re­search and the Na­tion­al In­sti­tute of Vi­rol­o­gy.

The WHO has de­scribed it as “ex­treme­ly suit­able for low- and mid­dle-in­come coun­tries due to easy stor­age re­quire­ments”.

Some of the oth­er ap­proved vac­cines must be stored at very low tem­per­a­tures, which throws up lo­gis­ti­cal and cost prob­lems.

Co­v­ax­in “was high­ly ef­fi­ca­cious against lab­o­ra­to­ry-con­firmed symp­to­matic COVID-19 dis­ease in adults”, the Lancet study said.

The jab was al­so “well tol­er­at­ed with no safe­ty con­cerns raised in this in­ter­im analy­sis”, it added.

The In­di­an-de­vel­oped vac­cine has a 78 per­cent ef­fi­ca­cy rate af­ter two dos­es over a month, ac­cord­ing to the WHO.

It has joined the COVID vac­cines pro­duced by Pfiz­er/BioN­Tech, Mod­er­na, As­traZeneca, John­son&John­son, Sinopharm and Sino­vac on the WHO-ap­proved list.

The roll­out of Co­v­ax­in can “in­crease the fi­nite glob­al man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pac­i­ty, and im­prove in­suf­fi­cient sup­ply of vac­cines, which dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly af­fects low-in­come and mid­dle-in­come coun­tries,” said Chi­nese re­searchers Li Jingx­in Li and Zhu Feng­cai, who did not take part in the study.

They did how­ev­er men­tion cer­tain lim­its to the study, say­ing that as the tri­als had been con­duct­ed sole­ly in In­dia, there was a less eth­ni­cal­ly di­verse study group.

The stud­ies were al­so car­ried out be­tween No­vem­ber 2020 and Jan­u­ary 2021, be­fore the more con­ta­gious Delta vari­ant of the virus be­came wide­spread.

De­spite the tri­al dates, the re­searchers in­volved were able to iden­ti­fy which of the pa­tients were in­fect­ed with the Delta vari­ant. For this sub-group, the study found that Co­v­ax­in still pro­vid­ed pro­tec­tion against COVID-19 but was slight­ly less ef­fec­tive.