New Delhi (NVI): The Indian Council of Medical Research today said that human trials for two indigenous Covid-19 vaccines have started with 1000 human volunteers.
ICMR Director General, Balram Bhargava said that two indigenous Indian Candidate vaccines have got clearance to start early phase human trials this month. “Approximately 1,000 human volunteers are participating in clinical trials for each of these two indigenous vaccines,” Bhargava said during a media briefing.
“There are 2 Indian indigenous candidate vaccines. They have undergone successful toxicity studies in rats, mice and rabbits. The data was submitted to DCGI following which both these got clearance to start early phase human trials early this month,” he said.
Bharat Biotech is one of the primary runners in the race to develop India’s first vaccine. The company has been developing a vaccine in collaboration with the ICMR and the NIV (National Institute of Virology, Pune). Bharat Biotech received its DCGI nod on June 29 to go ahead with the human trials.
Apart from that, the Health Ministry has said that 22 states are doing more than 140 COVID-19 tests per day/million as per the Comprehensive Testing guidance note by WHO.
In many states, the number of daily discharges from hospitals is more than the number of daily admissions. 86 per cent of total active corona cases are confined to just 10 states- Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, the Ministry said, adding the other eight sates accounted for 36% of the total cases.
Rajesh Bhushan, OSD, Ministry of Health, said the recovered cases had become 1.18 times more than the active cases. “From May 2 to May 30, a number of active COVID-19 cases was more than recovered cases. After that, the difference between the number of active and recovered cases is rising. Today, the number of recovered cases is 1.8 times higher than the active cases,” he said.
Meanwhile, 20 States/UTs have a higher recovery rate than the national average of 63 per cent, the ministry said. These include Tripura (71%), Chandigarh (72%), Madhya Pradesh (73%), Rajasthan (75%), Himachal Pradesh (76%), Haryana (76%), Chhattisgarh (76%), Uttarakhand (79%), Delhi (80%) and Ladakh (87%).
-ARK
