India  plays a useful and responsible role in development and production of COVID-19 vaccines

Responding to the questions about development and production of COVID-19 vaccines in India, Ambassador of India to the Republic of Azerbaijan B.Vanlalvawna said that presently India is working on three leading COVID-19 vaccines candidates. Two of the three candidates include the indigenously developed vaccines by Bharat Biotech International and by Zydus Cadila which are both undergoing phase II clinical trials. The third by Serum Institute of India in collaboration with AztraZeneca is conducting phase III of clinical trials and has also commenced manufacturing. 

The Ambassador underlined the progress made by India in this regard. He said the scientific community with the participation of volunteers and the larger public are making efforts to introduce a safe and effective vaccine soon for people in India and for the good of all humanity. India is the largest manufacturer of vaccines in the world. It's combined capacity to produce around 3 billion doses of vaccines annually would be crucial once the vaccines under trials are formally approved. Referring to what the Prime Minister of India said recently, the Ambassador said that India is also already working on putting a well-established vaccine delivery system in place using a digitised network to ensure a smooth immunisation process. 

With regard to the latest on COVID-19 situation in India, the Ambassador said that the number of daily infections have come down recently to below 50,000 for the first time since the end of July 2020. India continues to have a high recovery rate of around 88.6% and low fatality rate at 1.52%. Recognising that one of the most effective strategies of combating the virus is through testing, India has increased its capacity to test more individuals with over 1 million tests conducted everyday. He said India has conducted more than 95 million COVID-19 tests so far.