Indian Covid-19 vaccine ’highly efficacious’ with no safety concerns: Lancet

The Covid-19 vaccine made by Bharat Biotech is 'highly efficacious' and presents no safety concern, a new study by the medical journal The Lancet said on Thursday. Bharat Biotech's Covaxin was found to have a 77.8% efficacy rate against symptomatic Covid-19 patients, The Lancet added. Covaxin “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 randomised trial involving 24,419 participants aged 18-97 years between November 2020 and May 2021 in India, the medical journal added. The interim study was funded by Bharat Biotech and the Indian Council of Medical Research and partly authored by officials at both bodies.

Recently, Covaxin has gained emergency approval from the World Health Organization and has already been cleared for use in 17 countries.

Covaxin has joined the anti-Covid vaccines produced by Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson&Johnson, Sinopharm, and Sinovac on the WHO-approved list.

The UN body has described it as "extremely suitable for low- and middle-income countries due to easy storage requirements".

However, more research would be required to discover Covaxin's long-term safety and effectiveness, as well as protection against hospitalisation, death, along with its ability to fend off Covid delta variant and other variants of concern, The Lancet added.