Covaxin | Bharat Biotech
Bharat Biotech's Covaxin most effective against Indian variant of coronavirus, says top US medical adviser Dr Fauci
New Delhi/IBNS: Covaxin, developed by Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech, ICMR and National Institue of Virology, has been found to protect against the B.1.617 variant or the Indian double mutant strain, said White House Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci on Tuesday.
"This is something we are still gaining data on, but most recent data looking at convalescent sera of Covid-19 cases in people who received Covaxin...it was found to neutralize the 617 variant," Dr Fauci said at a White House briefing.
Dr Fauci stressed that "vaccination could be a very, very important antidote against this" despite the massive rate of infection in India.
"So I'll stop there with the final statement. The one thing you can gather from everything I've said: that it's very important to get vaccinated," he was quoted as saying in the media.
Covaxin had received approval on January 3 for emergency use despite being in the trial phase.
The opposition, including Congress, had attacked the Centre for approving the vaccine before the completion of the third phase of the trial. Congress leaders had accused the government of putting at risk people's lives even as Bharat Biotech had defended the effectiveness of Covaxin.
ICMR, which is one of the developers of the vaccine, later said that the trials showed the vaccine to be 78 per cent effective.
The B.1.617 variant which has been found in the infected people in Delhi and Maharashtra has three new spike protein mutations and is behind the deadly surge in the Covid cases across the country.
Meanwhile, WHO said that the B.1.617 strain has been found in over a dozen countries.
The UN health body said the strain first found in India "has been detected in over 1,200 sequences uploaded to the GISAID open-access database from at least 17 countries.'"
"Most sequences were uploaded from India, the United Kingdom, USA and Singapore," the WHO said in its weekly update.
WHO has currently listed it as " a variant of interest".
On Wednesday, India recorded 3,60,960 new Covid-19 cases and 3,293 deaths in the last 24 hours.
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