The Covaxin vaccine, the first developed in India against covid-19, clearly prevents the appearance of the disease, according to a study published on Thursday, while the World Health Organization (WHO) has already approved it.
This vaccine is “highly effective against symptomatic covid-19 (…) in adults,” summarizes the study published in The Lancet, adding that it was “well tolerated”, without significant serious side effects.
The WHO had already approved this vaccine as an emergency a few days ago based on this study although it had not yet been made public.
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Covaxin, produced by the Bharat Biotech group, thus joins the Pfizer / BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Sinopharm and Sinovac anticovid vaccines on the WHO list.
The study, in which 25,000 people who received the vaccine or a placebo participated, showed that there were about three-quarters fewer cases of covid-19 in those vaccinated.
This efficiency is lower than that initially seen in the Pfizer and Moderna messenger RNA vaccines, but it is still high.
The vaccine is especially interesting for poor and developing countries, as it requires less logistics than messenger RNA vaccines.
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The latter must be stored at very low temperatures, which requires significant logistical capacity.
The arrival of Covaxin could “improve the inadequate supply of vaccines that disproportionately affects low- and middle-income countries,” say Chinese researchers Jing-Xin Li and Feng-Cai Zhu, who were not involved in the study.
However, they point to some limitations: the trials were conducted only in India, “which makes the study cohort less ethnically diverse and limits the generalizability of these results to other populations.”
In addition, the study was carried out between November 2020 and January 2021, before the delta variant became general, more contagious and potentially more resistant to vaccination. (I)
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