Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to visit Pune's Serum Institute of India (SII) on Saturday, November 28. He would be visiting to review the work being done on the development of 'Covishield' COVID-19 vaccine which is currently being developed by pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca in partnership with Oxford University.
SII has partnered with AstraZeneca and Oxford University for the manufacturing and distribution of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate 'Covishield' in India and other countries. SII Pune Divisional Commissioner Saurav Rao confirmed that the Prime Minister would be visiting on November 28.
Earlier in the week, Oxford-AstraZeneca had announced that their coronavirus vaccine candidate had shown 70 per cent efficiency. Oxford-AstraZeneca had further said that their vaccine candidate could be around 90 per cent effective under "one dosing regimen". Oxford University released a press statement on the interim trial data from Phase 3 trials of the COVID-19 vaccine candidate. "Phase 3 interim analysis including 131 Covid-19 cases indicates that the vaccine is 70.4% effective when combining data from two dosing regimens," said a press release note released by Oxford University. It also read, "In the two different dose regimens, vaccine efficacy was 90% in one, and 62% in the other".
"Early indication that vaccine could reduce virus transmission from an observed reduction in asymptomatic infections," the release further added. The Oxford University release also said that that none of the trial participants were hospitalised and there were no severe cases of COVID-19 infection once the vaccine was administered to the participants.
Apart from Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine candidate, Pfitzer-BioNTech and Moderna have reported preliminary results from late-stage trials showing that their COVID-19 vaccines candidates were almost 95% effective in preventing virus infection.