Toddlers booked for violating home quarantine rules

UTTARKASHI: Agovernmentofficial onCovid-19dutydecidedtoinvestigate over phone a violation of home quarantine by a group of people who returned to their village in Uttarkashi district from Haryana, and in the process booked a six-month-old and a three-year-old, resultinginwidespreadoutrage--andhissuspension.

The official, an assistant engineer in the irrigation department,didnotgetdetailsaboutthe age of the violators due to which the names of the two children wereincluded, saiddistrictmagistrate Ashish Chauhan.

NEWDELHI: Human safety trials of acoronavirusvaccinedeveloped by Oxford University began on Thursday even as Indian company Serum Institute of India started work on making the vaccine locally so as to be ready in case the trial succeeds.

The trial began in Oxford on Thursday,withthefirsttwoof800 healthy volunteersrecruitedfor the study being injected with a newvaccine,ChAdOx1nCoV-19. Thisisthesixthcoronavirusvaccine to enter the first phase of clinicaltrials, raisinghopesofan antidote against the virus that continues to ravage the world.

Ifthetrialsareasuccess,scientists hope to have one million dosesreadybySeptember,andto dramatically scale up manufacturing after that.

Pune-basedSerumInstituteof India(SII)haspartneredwiththe Oxford University to manufacture the vaccine in India even as the trial starts.

“SII plans to begin manufacturing the ChAdOx1 vaccine in anticipation of the clinical trials intheUKsucceedingbySeptember/October. SII will initiate the manufacture at its own risk to jump-start manufacturing and have enough doses available, if the clinical trials work,” said SII CEO Adar Poonawalla.

The trial will study whether the new vaccine is safe and can generate strong immune responses against (severe acute respiratory syndrome) SarsCov-2, the virus that causes the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), and protect healthy people from infection.

The vaccine is made from a weakened version of a common cold adenovirus taken from chimpsandgeneticallymodified to make it impossible for it to infect humans.

To develop the vaccine, researchersaddedgeneticmaterial to ChAdOx1 from the SarsCoV-2 virus’ surface protein, spike glycoprotein (S), which helps the virus to bind to Ace2 receptors to enter human cells and cause an infection.