The Covid-19 vaccine manufactured by AstraZeneca, Oxford is authorized by India

“Last year he started with the crown. This year has started with a vaccine, ”he said on Saturday in a briefing in New Delhi.

The UK authorized the vaccine earlier this week and India is one of the first countries to follow suit.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine could be a good choice for India and other developing countries thanks to its price, comfort and expected global reach. AstraZeneca is committed to making up to three billion doses available in 2021 — more than any other Covid-19 vaccine manufacturer — and at a cheaper price.

The British company says it will not reap benefits from the shooting during the pandemic, nor ever in the case of the poorest countries.

The vaccine can be transported and stored for months under normal refrigeration, which facilitates distribution in places where people and health networks are overly stretched and underfunded. Many of the other leading Western vaccines require ultra-cold temperatures for every day or week, except for a few days.

India has already been building its vaccine distribution network and over the weekend did a dry test in some states to test it. Its first wave of vaccinations will be that of its national child vaccination network, one of the largest in the world. This network reaches the entire South Asian nation, but does not have the freezers or transportation equipment needed to handle vaccines that require extremely cold temperatures.

In India, AstraZeneca has a manufacturing and distribution agreement with the Serum Institute of India to provide more than one billion doses to developing countries. The institute is already the world’s largest vaccine maker by volume, and makes more than a billion doses a year, from polio to measles, primarily for export to emerging markets.

Confident that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine would get approval, SII has been manufacturing and storing it and already has about 50 million doses ready. He has not said how much of that would be for India, but in the past he said he hoped that in the end half of its production would be for domestic use.

While early approval by India and storage by the Serum Institute will speed up the process, a nationwide deployment will still take time. The richest and least populated countries are already struggling with logistics. India plans to administer more than 300 million doses in the next six months, to start harming its population of more than 1.3 billion people.

The vaccine makes two shots and British health officials recommend a delay of up to three months between each dose. A similar guideline applies to vaccines developed by Pfizer Inc.

and BioNTech SE that the UK authorized in early December. The Pfizer-BioNTech plan and one developed by Moderna Inc.

they have also been eliminated in the US

India needs an affordable and easy-to-distribute vaccine as it has been confirmed that more than 10 million Indians have been infected, just after the US. Although its daily infection rate has dropped in recent months, it still has about 20,000 new infections and more than 200 deaths every day.

Meanwhile, during the six months to September, India’s gross domestic product contracted by more than 15% over the previous year. The government wants a vaccine to end the fear of coronavirus and allow the economy to bounce back to create more and better jobs for its young population.

Write to Vibhuti Agarwal to [email protected] and Eric Bellman to [email protected]