India to help its neighbours build up vaccine storage capacity

New Delhi: India will help all countries, especially its neighbours, enhance their cold chain and storage capacities for delivery of the Covid-19 vaccine, the government said on Thursday. The foreign ministry said that India organised two training modules for its neighbouring countries in which 90 health experts and scientists participated.

“We propose to expand these programmes to include other interested countries. From October 17-19, a delegation of the departments concerned visited Bangladesh and had fruitful discussions with their counterparts on the current stage of vaccine development in India and modalities of clinical trials in Bangladesh,” MEA spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said. “In due course, depending on the trials in India, we propose to expand our cooperation with other countries, and also in clinical trials and capacity building for vaccine development, production and delivery,” he added.

On Bangladesh, the government said a bilateral air bubble had been operationalised with effect from October 28 with two flights of US-Bangla Airlines flying on the Dhaka-Kolkata and Dhaka-Chennai sectors.