India used 9 Covid vaccines to fight Coronavirus

New Delhi: To win the fight against the deadly coronavirus disease, India has over the last two years indigenously developed or arranged nine (9) Covid vaccines for providing protection to its population with the mass vaccination programme. The country started administering vaccines to its population after giving some of these newly developed vaccines emergency use authorisation from January 16, 2021 onwards.

While Covishield and Covaxin were cleared for mass usage in January 2021, Russia’s Sputnik was approved for use in April 2021 and rolled out in India in May the same year. Other Covid vaccines that were later cleared for emergency use were ZyCoV-D (DNA vaccine approved in August 2021), Corbevax and Covovax (CDSCO approved them in late December 2021), Sputnik Light (given emergency use nod in February 2022), Bio E Covid-19 (given emergency use approval in February 2022) and Bharat Biotech’s intranasal vaccine BBV154 (regulator’s approval in November 2022).

Gennova RNA vaccine HGC019 is a Covid vaccine that received the DCGI nod on August 24, 2021 for phase II/III trials.

As of December 23, 2022, over 220 crore vaccination doses have been given since the start of the vaccination programme in January 2021, covering over 90 % of the eligible population with two doses, including administration of 22.35 crores precaution doses.

As per Wikipedia, vaccination in India with different vaccine brands as of December 2, 2022, were Covishield (1,74,46,86,317), Covaxin (36,14,33,949), Sputnik V (12,32,670), Corbevax (7,37,81,550) and Covovax (26,717).

“In the last few days, we have seen an increasing trajectory of covid-19 cases across the world. India on the other hand has shown a continued decreasing trajectory of cases since last one year. Presently 153 new cases on an average are being reported daily across the country, but globally approximately 5.87 lakh new cases are still being reported on an average on daily basis,” Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya said in Parliament recently.

According to a June 2022 study published in The Lancet, Covid-19 vaccination in India prevented an additional 4.2 million deaths from December 8, 2020, to December 8, 2021.