 Delhi will start screening children for clinical trials of Covaxin, the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Bharat Biotech and ICMR, from Monday.){kind=link}
The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Delhi will start screening children for clinical trials of Covaxin, the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Bharat Biotech and ICMR, from Monday.
The clinical trials of Covaxin will be conducted on children aged between two and 18 years old to see if it is suitable for them, days after AIIMS Patna began the trials.
According to experts, there is a possibility of a third wave of coronavirus pandemic which can bring much devastation if enough people are not vaccinated against the virus, and the children could be its prime target this time, they said.
The vaccines being used currently have not been approved for children use. Only after getting permission from the Drugs Controller General of India, the clinical trials of Covaxin is being conducted in view of warnings. However, the other vaccines like Covishield and Sputnik V have not been authorised for use in children.
AIIMS Delhi will include a total of 525 children in these clinical trials of Covaxin who will be divided into three groups. In the first group, there will be 175 children aged between 12 and 18 years while the second group will have 175 children aged between 6 and 12 years. The third group will have another 175 children aged between 2 and 6 years.
All of the volunteers will receive two doses of the Covaxin vaccine through the intramuscular route. The first and second dose will have a gap of 28 days.
In other countries like the US and Canada, Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine have been authorised for use in some age groups of children. China has also approved the emergency use of CoronaVac, a Covid-19 vaccine manufactured by Chinese firm Sinovac, for children aged between 3 and 17 years.
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Meanwhile, the situation in India is slowly normalising as it logged 1.14 lakh fresh cases, the lowest in two months. It had reported over 4 lakh daily cases in April.