Aiding India's vaccine efforts - diplomatically

Even as the USA has rolled out a series of supportive measures to help India's fight against the COVID-19 upsurge, White House chief medical adviser and America's top pandemic expert Dr Anthony Fauci said Covaxin, India’s home-grown COVID-19 vaccine, has been found to neutralize the ‘617’ variant of the deadly virus, reports The Pharma Letter’s India correspondent.

Speaking to media representatives, Dr Fauci said although they are still gaining data on a daily basis, the most recent data was looking at convalescent Sera of COVID-19 cases and people who received the vaccine used in India, the Covaxin. "It was found to neutralize the 617 variants. So, despite the real difficulty that we are seeing in India, vaccination could be an especially important antidote against this," said Dr Fauci.

Developed by India's Bharat Biotech in partnership with the National Institute of Virology and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), Covaxin was approved for emergency use on January 3, while still in clinical trial. Later, trial results showed the vaccine has an efficacy of 78%, for its ability to neutralize the B.1.617 variant, according to ICMR.