No evidence that current vaccine will fail to protect against new coronavirus variant: Govt scientific advisor

"There is no evidence that current vaccines will fail to protect against COVID19 variants reported from the UK or SA," he said while addressing a press conference.

"Vaccines will work against the reported new variants of SARSCoV2," he said.

The Government of India said it has taken cognizance of the reports of mutant variant of SARS- CoV-2 virus reported from the UK and put in place a pro-active and preventive strategy to detect and contain the mutant variant.

The Indian government on Tuesday confirmed six people, who returned from the UK, have tested positive for the new coronavirus strain.

"From 25th November to 23rd December 2020 midnight, about 33,000 passengers disembarked at various Indian airports from UK. All these passengers are being tracked and subjected by States/UTs to RT-PCR tests. So far only 114 have been found positive. These positive samples have been sent to 10 INSACOG labs (NIBMG Kolkata, ILS Bhubaneswar, NIV Pune, CCS Pune, CCMB Hyderabad, CDFD Hyderabad, InSTEM Bengaluru, NIMHANS Bengaluru, IGIB Delhi, NCDC Delhi) for genome sequencing," read the government statement.

A total of 6 samples of 6 UK returnee persons have been found to be positive with the new U.K variant genome. 3 in NIMHANS, Bengaluru, 2 in CCMB, Hyderabad and 1 in NIV, Pune.

"All these persons have been kept in single room isolation in designated Health Care facilities by respective State Governments. Their close contacts have also been put under quarantine. Comprehensive contact tracing has been initiated for co-travellers, family contacts and others. Genome sequencing on other specimens is going on," read the statement.

It is important to note that the presence of the new UK Variant has already been reported by Denmark, Netherlands, Australia, Italy, Sweden, France, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Japan, Lebanon and Singapore, so far.

 Meanwhile, the Union Ministry of Health & Family Welfare conducted a two-day dry run for activities entailed in Covid-19 vaccination in four states Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and Gujarat on Dec 28 and 29.

The dry run exercise is aimed at end-to-end testing of COVID-19 vaccination process and will include planning & preparations as per the Operational Guidelines; creation of facilities & users on Co-WIN application, session site creation & mapping of sites, Health Care Workers (HCW) data upload, receipt of vaccines and vaccine allocationby the district, session planning, deployment of vaccination team, logistics mobilization at session site, mock drill of conducting vaccination and reporting and review meetings at block, districts and state level.

The objective of dry the run is also to undertake and confirm field implementation of IT platform Co-WIN and guide way forward prior to actual implementation.