Jab for adolescents

The Drug Controller General of India’s approval for emergency use of the world’s first needle-free, plasmid DNA Covid-19 vaccine marks a significant breakthrough not only for the home-grown drugmaker, but also for the country’s ambitious vaccination drive. Developed in partnership with the Department of Biotechnology, Zydus Cadila’s three-dose ZyCoV-D would be the first vaccine for children in the 12-18 age group and the sixth for adults in India. This second indigenous vaccine after Bharat Biotech-ICMR’s Covaxin has shown primary efficacy of 66.6 per cent in the phase-III clinical trials. There is also hope of a two-dose regimen in the near future.

India has set itself a steep task of vaccinating at least 90 lakh people a day and the Zydus vaccine’s arrival next month promises to provide a huge fillip to the inoculation programme. Though stored at 2-8 degrees Celsius, it has good stability at 25 degrees for at least three months, making it easier to transport and store. To be given at intervals of 28 and 56 days using the painless PharmaJet needle-free applicator, it will bring adolescents within the ambit of vaccination and also those avoiding getting inoculated because of their fear of needles. The opening of schools thus could become a reality sooner than later.

Along with this heartening news come distressing figures detailing the gross inequities across regions in the global fight against the pandemic. Data shows that though one-fourth of the world is now fully vaccinated against Covid-19, which is an encouraging aggregate, just 0.6 per cent of people in the poorest nations figure among them, while 50 per cent people are fully vaccinated in the richest nations. The stark difference in numbers only highlights the lack of a cohesive, determined effort at the global level to combat coronavirus, and how it could mar the march against the pandemic.