Vaccine will take 2 years, says Novartis’ Narasimhan

Zurich, May 15: Any vaccine to fight the new coronavirus will not be ready for use for at least two years, the chief executive of Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, which no longer makes vaccines itself, told a German newspaper.

Novartis sold its vaccine business in 2015 to GlaxoSmithKline, one of many firms around the world now racing to make a drug. Some are already testing vaccine candidates on humans.

"The results of the first clinical studies on the vaccine candidates should be available in autumn," Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

The southwest monsoon rains, the lifeblood of the Indian economy, irrigating over 70 per cent of farm land with no irrigation facilities, are likely to be delayed this year, impacting sowing and planting of crops such as rice, corn, soybeans and cotton in Asia's third biggest economy.

The crucial rains may reach the southern coastal state of Kerala on June 5, the state-run India Meteorological Department, or IMD, said on Friday. The normal onset date is June 1.

"This year, the onset of southwest monsoon over Kerala is likely to be slightly delayed as compared to normal date of onset. The monsoon onset over Kerala this year is likely to be on 5th June with a model error of ± 4 days," the IMD said in its latest bulletin.

"There is nothing to worry as even deviation of one week is taken as normal," D. Sivananda Pai, India's chief monsoon forecaster at IMD told Financial Chronicle.

Private forecaster Skymet said monsoon is expected to arrive over Kerala on May 28 with an error margin of +/- 02 days. The onset date over Kerala has no bearing on its further advancement to reach various parts of the country.

Last year, the IMD had forecast arrival of monsoon on June 6 but rains came two days late on June 8.

The June-September rainy season is critical to Indian agriculture that accounts for about 14 per cent of India's $2.7 trillion economy, the seventh largest in the world, and employs more than half of the country's 1.3 billion people.

Millions of Indians desperately await rains as they struggle to secure drinking water amid a heat wave in parts of the country drying up reservoirs and sending temperatures soaring.

Farmers generally wait for the monsoon to arrive before planting crops such as rice, corn, pulses, cotton and sugarcane. Any deficit in showers in the early part of the season could delay sowing and hit yields, even if rains gather pace later.

The weather office in April predicted this year's monsoon will be 100 per cent of the long-term average of 88 cm. Last year's monsoon rainfall was 10 per cent more than normal.