India's indigenously-developed COVID-19 vaccine Covaxin may soon receive Emergency Use Listing by the World Health Organisation (WHO), eventually enabling its recipients to travel abroad without mandatory quarantine, NITI Aayog's Member, Health, VK Paul said on Wednesday. Data sharing and data evaluation are going on and a positive decision may come soon, he said.
"The data sharing and data evaluation have been going on through multiple reviews and we are close to a decision point. We must give time to WHO to make their decisions based on science. However, we hope that these decisions can be taken quickly because people who are receiving Covaxin have certain imperatives of travel. We are hoping for an early decision," Dr Paul said.
"We believe that a positive decision could be coming in, before the end of the month," he added. In August, Indian Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya also met WHO Chief Scientist Dr Soumya Swaminathan and held discussions over the WHO approval of Covaxin. The vaccine's developer Bharat Biotech has submitted its Phase 3 clinical trials data that demonstrated 77.8% efficacy to the Subject Expert Committee (SEC) of the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO).
The WHO has so far approved COVID-19 vaccines by Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Johnson and Johnson, Moderna, and Sinopharm.
Last month, Chief Scientist of the World Health Organisation Dr Soumya Swaminathan said in an interview that she was fairly confident that the WHO's technical group will be satisfied to give Covaxin clearance to be one of its authorised vaccines, and that it could happen soon.
In an interview to journalist Karan Thapar for news website The Wire, she also said that COVID-19 in India may be entering some kind of stage of endemicity where there is low or moderate level of transmission going on. The endemic stage is when a population learns to live with a virus. It's very different from the epidemic stage when the virus overwhelms a population, she added.
With IANS inputs