China vaccines could help India fight virus strains
India is facing extremely severe COVID- 19 infections, which required the country to adopt more draconian measures to curb further infections and launch rapid research on vaccine upgrades, Chinese experts said Monday after reports that a total of 240 new strains of COVID- 19 have surfaced across India which saw a spike of infections since last week.
Randeep Guleria, director of the All- India Institute of Medical Sciences ( AIIMS), said on Saturday that the new strains could be highly transmissible and dangerous, and would cause people who have antibodies reinfected, NDTV reported.
India is the world’s second worsthit country, with new COVID- 19 cases surpassing 11 million on Monday.
“India has come into a state of fatigue, as its current epidemic control capabilities, energy, and resources have reached their limits,” Lan Jianxue, deputy director of the Department for Asia- Pacific Studies at China Institute of International Studies, told the Global Times on Monday.
Lan noted that the Indain government and health departments need to take more aggressive measures in detection, tracking, and quarantine to find as many infected people as possible and cut off the chain of infections as early as possible.
India plans to vaccinate 300 million people from high- risk groups by the end of July. However, it would be hard for India to achieve “herd immunity,” according to Guleria, as highly transmissible mutations or variants may have “immune escape mechanism.”
Tao Lina, a Shanghai- based vaccine expert, told the Global Times that, in the case of the “escape mechanism,” the antibodies would become ineffective, and that the possibility of re- infections is “not low.”
Lan suggested India start cooperating with China on COVID- 19 vaccines, bringing Chinese vaccines to India to diversify vaccine supplies domestically. “Many developing countries are using Chinese vaccines, which are reliable in efficacy and cost effective,” Lan noted.
Scientific monitoring on the mutations of this virus has become pressing as new variants have been found around the world, experts said. “We need to find out whether the mutations may have a significant impact on the effectiveness of the vaccine, whether we need to develop a separate vaccine, or upgrade existing vaccines,” Tao said.