Indian Medical Workers Reluctant To Use Domestic Vaccine Covaxin - Reports

Muhammad Irfan Published February 25, 2021 | 06:50 PM

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 25th February, 2021) India's domestically-produced COVID-19 vaccine Covaxin is largely unpopular within the Indian health care sector as only 11 percent of vaccinated workers were inoculated with it, Hindustan Times reported on Thursday.

There are currently two vaccines with the authorization for emergency use in India � Covaxin and Covishield, an Indian-manufactured analogue of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine. Both have still not completed Phase 3 clinical trials.

According to the report, citing Co-Win, which is the Indian government's online platform for tracking the progress of the vaccination campaign, more than 10.5 million Indian medical workers were vaccinated to date, and only 1.2 million of them � or around 11 percent � took Covaxin. The other 9.4 million medical workers used Covishield.

"It's all because of the initial discussion about how (COVAXIN) was only an experimental vaccine, how it had not completed the Phase-3 trial. These things created doubts in the minds of people, resulting in lesser acceptance," Subhash Salunkhe, a medical adviser to the government of India's Maharashtra state, told the newspaper.

Covaxin was developed by Indian pharmaceutical company Bharat Biotech and granted an emergency use approval in India on January 3. The vaccine is built on the inactivated virus platform. Its dosing regimen is two shots per patient 28 days apart.

India launched its COVID-19 vaccination campaign on January 16. The lack of confidence in the homegrown vaccine risks preventing the country from meeting its target of vaccinating 300 million people by August, the newspaper fears. India's population is over 1.36 billion people.

Behind only the United States, India has the second-highest toll of coronavirus cases, as of Thursday. According to the latest reported data from the Indian Ministry of Health, the cumulative toll is over 11 million cases, including more than 156,000 deaths and some 10.7 million recoveries.