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Bharat Biotech's Covaxin ‘highly efficacious’ with 77.8% efficacy against all COVID variants

Covaxin, which uses traditional, inactivated-virus technology, "induces a robust antibody response" two weeks after two doses are given, The Lancet said in a statement.

Bharat Biotech's Covaxin 'highly efficacious' with 77.8% efficacy against all COVID variants-dnm
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New Delhi, First Published Nov 12, 2021, 10:31 AM IST

India’s indigenous Covid-19 vaccine, Covaxin developed by Bharat Biotech, is ‘highly efficacious’ and presents no safety concern, with a 77.8% efficacy rate against symptomatic Covid-19 in a long-awaited analysis, a new study by The Lancet said on Thursday. The Lancet peer-review said that the efficacy analysis was based on 130 symptomatic Covid-19 cases among the participants, while 24 positive cases were found in the vaccine group and 106 cases in the placebo group.

Covaxin, which uses traditional, inactivated-virus technology, "induces a robust antibody response" two weeks after two doses are given, The Lancet said in a statement. No severe-vaccine-related deaths or adverse events were recorded during a randomized trial involving 24,419 participants aged 18-97 years between November 2020 and May 2021 in India, the medical journal said.

"Efficacy against any severity of Covid-19 with onset 14 days after the second vaccination was 77.8 per cent... Our preliminary analysis found an efficacy of 65.2 per cent against the Delta variant, but further investigations are necessary to confirm clinical efficacy against this variant and others," the study further said.

The journal said, adding that a majority of the adverse events, including headache, fatigue, fever, and pain at the injection site, were mild and occurred within seven days of vaccination.

Also read: India issues new norms for international arrival, exempts COVID test for kids under 5

Meanwhile, Bharat Biotech has now published data from Phase III trials of its coronavirus vaccine, weeks after securing WHO’s Emergency Use Listing (ELU) for Covaxin. In a press release, the Hyderabad based company said that following a safety and efficacy analysis of Covaxin, it was found that the jabs are 77.8% effective against symptomatic and 63.6% against asymptomatic cases of Covid-19.

Now, Covaxin has joined the anti-Covid vaccines produced by Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Sinopharm, and Sinovac on the WHO-approved list. The WHO has described it as “extremely suitable for low- and middle-income countries due to easy storage requirements”.

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