Vaccine for children aged above three years will be launched in next six months: Poonawala

Globally, the supply of vaccines has outmatched its demand. To keep up with the momentum, countries need to come together and form some agreement in order to prepare standard rules for clinical trials and manufacturing of the vaccines. Multilateral organisations and policy makers should be able to identify and isolate the new mutation/s and find out the efficacy of vaccine against it, in a time-bound manner. Joining the two other companies which are working towards developing the vaccine for children, SII has reached the trial phase of the vaccine for the children aged above three, and it should be ready within the next six months, stated Adar Poonawala, CEO, Serum Institute of India (SII) at the CII Partnership Summit 2021, organised in association with Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), Ministry of Commerce and Industry recently.

In the last two years of the pandemic, India is now better prepared to deal with such catastrophe, and hopefully the worst is behind us all. The Government of India has been working towards creating an effective healthcare system and has made enough provision for hospital beds and oxygen, he added.

He further said that with over a billion-dollar investment that has gone into developing and manufacturing the COVID-19 vaccine, the journey, so far, has given us several key lessons owing to the rapidly changing situation in accordance with the mutating virus.

On the Omicron virus, Poonawala apprised that they are working towards developing the vaccine booster shot which is more effective. ‘On the back of enough data, it is safe to say that booster vaccines are a proven strategy to get antibodies up to a great extent,’ he added.

Commending the Government of India’s role in tackling the challenges posed by the pandemic in the last two years, he stated that going forward, government and industry should work even more closely to further improve the business environment and simplifying the rules and regulations for manufacturers to expand the sector.