India on Tuesday said it was in ‘communication’ with Russia on the latter’s Covid-19 vaccine but only initial level of information sharing has taken place so far.
“As far as Sputnik V vaccine is concerned, both the countries are in communication. Some initial information has been shared. Some detailed information is awaited,” said Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan, addressing a press conference here. Russia’s Sputnik V, unveiled early this month, is said to be the first Covid-19 vaccine, even though the international scientific community is not yet convinced of its safety and efficiency.
A section of the media reported on Monday that Russian embassy in New Delhi has got in touch with the offices of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the government K VijayRaghavan, Department of Biotechnology Secretary Renu Swarup and Indian Council of Medical Research Director General Balram Bhargava regarding the vaccine developed by Gamaleya Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow. It also offered to share the efficacy and safety data from trials conducted in Russia.
However, Bhushan refused to answer whether India has expressed any willingness to manufacture the Sputnik V vaccine in the country.
Bhargava, who was also present at the briefing, said there are six major Covid-19 vaccine initiatives. While three of them are in different stages of clinical trials, three others are in pre-clinical evaluation.
Answering a question on whether India was making any upfront payment to the World Health Organisation’s Covid-19 vaccine initiative called Covax Facility, Bhushan said, as far as he knew the Covax meeting held on Monday did not ask member- countries to make any payment.
The facility, created jointly by WHO and two international vaccine organisations CEPI and GAVI, works on the principle of pooling demand for vaccine from member countries and pooling vaccine supply on the other, he said. As many as 172 countries in the world have evinced interest in this arrangement which has already identified nine Covid-19 candidate vaccines, including AstraZeneca- Oxford University vaccine being manufactured by the Pune-based Serum Institute. Nine more Covid-19 vaccine candidates are under Covax evaluation.
On the ramping up of testing in the country, the ICMR chief said the number of tests carried out went from 10 per day in end January to 10 lakh per day in August. Also helping to increase the number of tests in the country was development of number of indigenous kits. Home-grown kits helped bring down the cost of each RT-PCR test — considered gold standard — six fold from ₹2,000 to a little over ₹300, he said.
Bhushan said the number of Covid-19 patients requiring oxygen support was 2.7 per cent of total 7 lakh active patients, while 1.92 per cent patients were in ICU and 0.29 per cent patients on ventilator.
Meanwhile, the total active infections in the country witnessed a slight dip of nearly 6,400 in the last 24 hours to 7,04,348 with daily recoveries exceeding new cases. The number of active infections on Monday was 7,10,771.
Since Monday, around 61,000 samples tested positive for Covid-19, but the number of recoveries were 66,550 apart from 848 deaths, leading to a shrink in the total active cases.