The Covid-19 vaccine produced by AstraZeneca, Oxford is authorized by India

“It simply came to our notice then. This year started with a vaccine, “he said at a news briefing in New Delhi on Saturday.

The UK authorized the vaccine earlier this week, and India is one of the first countries to follow suit.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine could be a good fit for India and other developing countries due to its price, convenience and global expectation. AstraZeneca has promised to make up to three billion doses available in 2021 – more than any other Covid-19 vaccine manufacturer – and at a cheaper price.

The British company says it will not take advantage of the shooting during the pandemic or never in poorer countries.

The vaccine can be transported and stored for months with normal refrigeration, which makes it easier to distribute in places where people and health care networks are overburdened and underfunded. Many of the other top Western vaccines require ultra-cold temperatures for all but a few days or weeks.

India has already built its vaccine administration network and over the weekend has run a dry run in some states to test it. Its first wave of vaccinations will return to its national vaccination network for children, which is one of the largest in the world. That network reaches across the South Asian country, but does not have the freezers or transport equipment needed to handle vaccines that require extremely low temperatures.

In India, AstraZeneca has a manufacturing and distribution agreement with the Serum Institute of India to supply more than one billion doses to developing countries. The institute is already the world’s largest producer of vaccines by volume, delivering more than a billion doses a year for everything from polio to measles, especially for export to emerging markets.

Confident that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will receive approval, SII has done it and stored it and already has almost 50 million doses ready. He did not say how much this would be for India, but in the past he said he expected about half of its production to be for domestic use in the end.

While early approval by India and the Serum Institute repository will speed up the process, the nationwide launch will still take time. Richer and less populated countries are already struggling with logistics. India plans to deliver more than 300 million doses in the next six months, to begin to make a depth in its population of over 1.3 billion people.

The vaccine takes two photos, and British health officials recommend a delay of up to three months between each dose. Similar guidelines apply to vaccines developed by Pfizer Inc.

and BioNTech SE that the UK authorized earlier in December. The Pfizer-BioNTech image is one developed by Moderna Inc.

were also eliminated in the US

India needs an affordable, easy-to-distribute vaccine, as it has been confirmed that more than 10 million Indians have been infected, second only to the US While the daily rate of infection has fallen in recent months, it is still receiving about 20,000 new infections and over 200 deaths every day.

Meanwhile, in the six months to September, India’s gross domestic product contracted by more than 15% from a year earlier. The government wants a vaccine that will put an end to the fear of coronavirus and allow the economy to come back to create better and better jobs for its young population.

Write to Vibhuti Agarwal at [email protected] and Eric Bellman at [email protected]