During the coronavirus crisis, doctors and healthcare workers are giving absolutely everything in the world’s fight against the epidemic which has claimed more than 8 lakh lives globally. There are over 23.5 million confirmed cases of coronavirus and over 16 million people have recovered from the deadly outbreak.
Besides doctors, health care workers, researchers around the world also deserve our praises as they are trying to determine smart and effective ways to detect COVID-19.
In a significant development, India has developed a vaccine to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan stated that India will have its first coronavirus vaccine by the end of this year 2020.
He said that Covid-19 vaccine will be available in the next 4-5 months. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare said that one of the three Covid-19 vaccine candidates has entered the third phase of the pre-clinical human trial. India has conducted human clinical trials of the indigenously developed Covid-19 vaccine.
“One of our COVID-19 vaccine candidates is in the third phase of the clinical trial. We are very confident that a vaccine will be developed by end of this year,” Dr Harsh Vardhan said while inaugurating an NDRF 10-bedded makeshift hospital in Ghaziabad.
He further said: “I am happy to say that in the eighth month of the battle, India has the best recovery rate of 75 per cent. A total of 2.2 million patients have recovered and gone home and another seven lakh are going to be cured very soon.”
“We started with only one testing laboratory in Pune but we scaled up our diagnostic capabilities and strengthened our testing capacity. Today, India has 1500 testing labs for COVID-19 and on Friday we tested over one million samples,” the minister added.
“I hope that if everything goes well, India will have access to a coronavirus vaccine by the end of 2020,” the minister tweeted later.
According to V.K. Paul, head of the national task force on COVID-19, human clinical trials for Covid-19 vaccine has successfully been conducted. Paul said that the other two vaccines are currently in Phase-I or II of their pre-clinical trials.
