Nepal has given emergency authorisation to Bharat Biotech’s Covid-19 vaccine, making it the third foreign country after Brazil and Zimbabwe to include the India-made shots in its arsenal to fight the war against the deadly pandemic.
“Conditional permission has been granted for emergency use authorisation,” Nepal’s Department of Drug Administration said in a statement.
India has already supplied its Himalayan neighbour over 2.3 million doses of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine produced by the Pune-based Serum Institute as part of New Delhi’s “Neighbours First” policy. The consignment had included 1 million doses as a gift to inoculate Nepal’s frontline workers.
Earlier this month Zimbabwe had become the first African country to approve the Covaxin vaccine developed by Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech and the Indian Council of Medical Research.
Zimbabwe had followed in the footsteps of Brazil, the world’s second worst hit country by the pandemic next to the US, which had signed an agreement to buy 20 million doses of the Covaxin in February.
Brazil’s health ministry said in a statement that the first 8 million doses of Covaxin are expected to arrive in March.
Brazil has already got some shipments of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine from Serum Institute of India but wants to accelerate its inoculation campaign against the surge in coronavirus cases. The Latin American country is reporting a staggering 70,000-odd new cases of coronavirus every day.
Brazil, Mexico and Argentina are the three Latin American countries among the over 70 nations worldwide that have now got India-made vaccines.
Covaxin has proved to be 81% effective in an interim analysis of late-stage trial data on some 26,000 people and is one of the two vaccines being used in India’s inoculation drive which is in full swing with the aim of covering 300 million people by August.
Bharat Biotech has supplied 5.5 million doses of its vaccine Covaxin, developed with the government-run Indian Council of Medical Research, to the inoculation campaign in India. The Indian government will be buying another 4.5 million doses for the ongoing domestic vaccination programme.
Huge demand for Indian vaccines
There is a growing demand for Indian vaccines as the country has emerged as the “pharmacy of the world” amid the huge shortage that has developed for the shots worldwide. The country is also supplying AstraZeneca shots to Britain.
Indian vaccines are much cheaper and easier to handle as they can be stored at ordinary refrigeration temperatures of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius. The western-made Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, on the other hand, have to be kept at -70 degrees Celsius and require expensive cold-chain infrastructure that does not exist in most countries.
