WHO Approved Study Confirms Efficacy of Indian Covaxin COVID-19 Vaccine

The Covaxin vaccine, the first developed in India against COVID-19, clearly prevents the appearance of the disease, according to a study published on Thursday, while the World Health Organization (WHO) has already approved it.

This vaccine is “Highly effective against symptomatic COVID-19 (…) in adults”, summarizes the study published in The Lancet, and adds that it was “well tolerated,” with no significant serious side effects.

The WHO It had already approved this vaccine urgently a few days ago based on this study, although it had not yet been made public.

Covaxin, produced by the group Bharat Biotech, thus joins vaccines anticovid from Pfizer / BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Sinopharm and Sinovac on the WHO list.

The study, involving 25,000 people who received the vaccine or a placebo, showed that there were about three-quarters fewer cases of COVID-19 in the vaccinated.

This efficacy is lower than that initially observed in messenger RNA vaccines of Pfizer and Modern, but it is still high.

The vaccine is especially interesting for poor and developing countries, as it requires less logistics than messenger RNA vaccines.

The latter must be stored at very low temperatures, which requires significant logistical capacity.

The arrival of Covaxin could “Improve the inadequate supply of vaccines that disproportionately affects low- and middle-income countries”Chinese researchers claim Jing-Xin Li and Feng-Cai Zhu, who did not participate in the study.

However, they point to some limitations: the trials were conducted only in India, “Which makes the study cohort less ethnically diverse and limits the possibility of generalizing these results to other populations”.

In addition, the study was carried out between November 2020 and January 2021, before the delta variant became general, more contagious and potentially more resistant to vaccination.