COVID-19 Vs Vaccines: Contest Of The Millennium?
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Photo: bbc.com |
Amid the spree of
advance booking by various countries worldwide Pfizer-BioNTech has applied to
the Indian regulator DCGI (Drugs Controller General of India) for emergency use
authorization in India, the country with the teeming millions. However, it is
not clear as to how the US Pharma giant is going to transport the vaccine given
its very rigid requirement of -70 C cold storage, and how India is going to have
the required cold storage infrastructure ready. Just two days earlier Prime
Minister of India, Narendra Modi, had announced that vaccination would start in
the country within a few weeks. Again, it was not specified which of the three
vaccines would be ready, and exactly in how many weeks. Perhaps Covishield, the
Indian counterpart of the Oxford Astra-Zeneca vaccine is the next in line, with
the final phase trials still going on for the indigenous Covaxin and the Russian
Sputnik V.
Whatever be the exact
scenario emerging the important fact in the global fight against SARS-CoV-2 or
the novel Coronavirus or the COVID-19, is that the vaccines have arrived in an
incredibly limited time period, and vaccination has started or is about to
start in many countries of the world. If the vaccines work as per the claims of
efficacy the days of the killer virus is numbered, to the immense relief of
billions of citizens on Planet Earth. Doubts about the efficacy claims or about
how long antibodies would remain in the vaccinated would linger on and would
stay for a long time to come. In the meantime, more and more vaccines are going
to join in the fight. We can reasonably hope for at least one vaccine that
would pass the test in the long run and finally conquer the virus taking into
account its possible mutations as its counters to the efforts of a united humankind.
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