Children with comorbidities will have priority in vaccination for children under the age of 18, NK Arora, chairman of the National Technical Group on Vaccination Advice (NTAGI), said on Monday. Zydus Cadila’s Covid-19 vaccine, ZyCoV-D, which received emergency approval last week, is the first vaccine in India to be obtained for children over 12 years of age.
Arora added that Covaxin from Bharat Biotech is likely to be available for use in children by the end of the year and that the regulatory approval process for this could start anywhere between September and October.
“Children with comorbidities will have preference when pediatric vaccines are introduced into the system, either ZyCoV-D from Zydus Cadila or Covaxin from Bharat Biotech or the other that the Serum Institute of India is testing in children,” Arora said. .
Two vaccine candidates among children from India were tested: Covaxin and ZyCoV-D. The two are also the only ones of the six that have now been approved in India to develop autochthonously. Public health experts say children should be vaccinated against the disease when they are eligible in order to reduce their vulnerability to a possible third wave of infections, as they remain the only group that is not fully vaccinated.
Government experts will hold discussions on how to introduce the Zydus vaccine, as it is a three-dose intradermal vaccine that will be administered in 28-day gaps. “We also need to see how to introduce ZyCoV-D into the immunization unit,” Arora said.
Zydus said he also planned to seek approval for a dose regimen for his vaccine.
Last week, the president and managing director of Bharat Biotech, Krishna Ella, and the director of the Indian Council of Medical Research-National Institute of Virology (Pune), Dr. Priya Abraham, said that Covaxin would probably be approved. for children in September.
“The final phase of our clinical trials is over. Hopefully by the end of next month or next month we will get the license to use vaccines in children. This is the only vaccine in the world that can be given to children between the ages of 2 and 18, ”Ella said in an interview with Doordarshan news on Wednesday.
Because Bharat Biotech has collaborated with ICMR to develop Covaxin, Abraham also confirmed that the results of the Covaxin trial in children were expected soon.
“Hopefully, the results (of the trials) will be available very soon. These will be presented to the regulators. Therefore, in September or just after that, we may have Covid-19 vaccines for children, ”he added.
The Covaxin trial had 525 child volunteers, while the ZyCov-D trials, as part of the phase II / III clinical trials, included 1,000 volunteers in the 12- to 18-year-old age group.
Arora said another area that is receiving more and more attention is the need for booster doses and that studies have begun in the country to determine this.
“We will strictly rely on our own locally generated data on the need for booster doses,” he added.
However, experts said the first priority should be to vaccinate all eligible people.
“Reinforcement may be needed, but that will happen later; we must first think about covering all our population groups and high-risk adults,” said Dr. GC Khilnani, a former head of the lung medicine department. are from the Institute of Medical Sciences of India, Delhi.