COVID Vaccine, Dec 12: The United States has given emergency use authorization to the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine candidate. It comes a week after The UK became the first nation in the world to begin mass rollout of the vaccine against Covid-19.
Soon after the announcement, US President Donald Trump said, “Today our nation has achieved a medical miracle. We have delivered a safe and effective medicine in just nine months.”
US FDA has approved Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine for emergency use, with the first vaccinations expected within days.
FDA has granted an emergency use authorization for the Pfizer vaccine, developed with German partner BioNTech, was shown to be 95% effective in preventing the disease in a late-stage trial.
Following the announcement, US President Donald Trump called it a medical miracle achieved within 9 months. Trump also said the first doses of the Pfizer vaccine will be administered with 24 hours.
The Pfizer vaccine has already been approved for the public in the UK, Canada, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. India is also considering the Pfizer dose after the US pharma giant sought emergency use authorization here.
India is also actively considering two other vaccine candidates, those being developed by the Serum Institute of India (SII) in partnership with AstraZeneca and Oxford University and the second by Bharat Biotech.
India nod to mRNA vaccine :
India’s first indigenous mRNA vaccine candidate developed by Pune-based Genova has been given approval from drug regulators to initiate Phase 1/2 human clinical trials.
The mRNA vaccines do not use the conventional model to produce an immune response. Instead, they carry molecular instructions to make the protein in the body through a synthetic RNA of the virus.
The host body uses this to produce the viral protein that is recognized, thereby, making the body mount an immune response against the disease.
According to the Department of Biotechnology, the mRNA-based vaccines are scientifically the ideal choice to address a pandemic because of their rapid developmental timeline.
