Just recently on Friday, the 3rd of July, it was announced that coronavirus testing has now hit the 1 crore mark. The Centre has been trying their best to fast track the production of this drug and increase testing which the announced-on Thursday.
The tests have now almost reached about a crore due to the amount of testing taking place and that it’s so fast and about 1065 testing labs are open in India to prevent the spread of this virus. “The total number of people being tested will soon touch 1 crore. This has been possible due to the removal of all bottlenecks by the government in India” the health ministry said. Bottle necking is a process that causes delays in a project and increases production cost. Now that it’s out of our way the government can easily increase the level of production of these vaccines. According to the government, by using the labs in a more efficient way COVID 19 vaccines testing rate could go up significantly by possibly detecting symptoms earlier and altering prices of these tests On July 6th, experts involved in the trials told economic times that it will take at least 2 weeks for the vaccine trials to begin and about six months for the first two phases to be completed. The original plan was to release the vaccine worldwide on August 15th while ordering that all clinical trials are fast-tracked but it was not ready yet. The first three batches of the vaccine were sent to Kausali and Himachal Pradesh to test their sterility. If it is sterile it proves that the vaccine is of good quality and is safe to be injected and tested on people because the government’s first concern is our safety.
The company that produced the drug, Bharat Biotech, stated that they should be able to start recruiting patients by July 13th but the ethics committees of 5 of the 12 institutes are still figuring out the trial design which is a little concerning as they aren’t sure yet and the drug would only be in the process of testing once approved by the ethics committee.
“We cannot predict timelines at all. Safety is paramount in these vaccine trials. We are looking at a time frame of six months at least for phase 1 and 2 to finish” said CM Singh, whose institution is handling this trial. The date we have been given may not be the date we get the trials started and the vaccines delivered, at this point, almost everyone is unsure but has somewhat of an idea about what is to be done and when.
Writer: Anaya Parekh
08/07/2020
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