Fairly confident Covaxin will get nod by Sept: WHO chief scientist
NEW DELHI: The World Health Organisation chief scientist, Dr Soumya Swaminathan, said she is “fairly confident” that Bharat Biotech’s Covid-19 vaccine, Covaxin, will get clearance by the WHO’S technical group by mid-september.
In an interview to journalist Karan Thapar for news website The Wire, Swaminathan said, “The Bharat Biotech submitted their data in the third week of July which was the first data set, then there was an updated data set that came in the middle of August. The committee has gone back to the company with some questions which they must be in process of answering now. I think the technical advithat
sory group that ultimately approves will meet in the first 10 days of September and so we are hoping it happens soon after that.” “So by the middle of September I am thinking, and the reason it took longer was because of back and forth and the need for more data requested from the company and this is the usual process. People think it is taking longer for Covaxin than for others but is not the case... each company that applied for EUL (Emergency Use Listing) had taken this period of 4 to 6 to 8 weeks to get all the data needed,” she added.
She also said Covid-19 in India may be entering some kind of stage of endemicity where there is low or moderate level of transmission going on. he endemic stage is when a population learns to live with a virus. It’s very different from the epidemic stage when the virus overwhelms a population.
“We may be entering some kind of stage of endemicity where there is low level transmission or moderate level transmission going on but we are not seeing the kinds of exponential growth and peaks that we saw a few months ago,” Swaminathan said.