India’s drug regulator on Friday given a nod to Zydus Cadila’s three-dose Coronavirus DNA vaccine for emergency use in adults and children aged 12 years and above.
Zydus Cadila becomes the country’s first vaccine for adolescents in the 12-18 age group. It is also the second indigenous one after Bharat Biotech-ICMR’s Covaxin.
As per reports, the vaccine has shown 66.6% primary efficacy for symptomatic RT-PCR positive cases in phase-III clinical trials which was conducted on 28,000 volunteers, which was the largest vaccine trial so far in India for COVID-19.
The company said it plans to manufacture 100 million to 120 million doses of the vaccine annually and has started to stockpile the vaccine.
ZyCoV-D is the sixth in the Covid-19 vaccine pack to be made available in the Indian market, after Covaxin from Bharat Biotech, Covishield from Serum Institute of India (SII), Sputnik from Russia’s Gamaleya Institute, Moderna’s vaccine and Johnson and Johnson’s one-dose vaccine.