An Update: Covid-19 vaccine developments in India

India's Serum institute is ready with 40 million doses of AstraZeneca's Vaccine ready to ship and the Novavax's vaccine will be made. The bulk of Novavax vaccine has been received by Serum. Both of these need regulatory approval.

Serum has been working on getting regulatory approval for AstraZeneca's vaccine  from India based on its trial on 1600 participants. 

The final recipients of these vaccines are yet to be published.

• Additionally, India has two home-grown vaccines in development..

• Reddy's laboratories is carrying put out a trial of Russia's Sputnik vaccine developed by the Gemaleya Institute.

• Other major development has been the over 90% success rate of the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.

Current (as of 11/14/2020) statistics for the most affected 3 countries derived from Johns Hopkins' data is shown below.

Country	All Time		Past Day		Past Week		Past Month
	Confirmed Cases	Deaths	New Cases	New Deaths	New Cases	New Deaths	New Cases	New Deaths
INDIA	8,773,479	129,188	44,684	520	311,399	3,626	1,466,382	17,922
BRAZIL	5,810,652	164,737	29,070	456	179,471	2,722	669.789	12,990
US	10,737,335	244,332	177,224	1,138	979,723	7,327	2,841,426	27,143

Source :    https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region

It goes beyond saying that we need to outpace the virus and develop the vaccine(s) to put an end to this  human tragedy.

Storage temperature may be a challenge for some COVID-19 Vaccines

The vaccines developed by Moderna Inc. and BioNTech & Pfizer have this storage temperatures.

1. *Moderna's             mRNA-1273                               requires -4 deg F
2. BioNTech's             BN1162b2 and BNT162b2         requires -94 deg F

This could be a problem in some scenarios although successful in one-day vaccination event site.

Read more here:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/moderna-and-pfizers-covid-19-vaccine-candidates-require-ultra-low-temperatures-raising-questions-about-storage-distribution-2020-08-27

Trick of the vaccine is in the pricing

No vaccine has proved to be the most effective so far, but the battle has begun.

Vaccine, at what price?

Her is something I saw on Bloomberg tv recently:

Indian Serum Institute, the world's largest bulk producer of the vaccine (Oxford Vaccine) will be producing it and distributing it at a very reasonable price. Thank Bill Gates and Melinda Foundation!

It is about $3/dose. Moderna appears too expensive for developing countries. 

COVID-19 vaccines in Phase III trial

The following are the vaccines in Phase III testing phase

Moderna with National Institutes of Health USA

Launched Phase III on July 27,2020
US Government support `1 billion US$

BioNTech with Pfizer (NY) and Fosun Pharma(China)
Launched July 27 Phase III with 30,000 volunteers from 4 countries

US government offered $1.9 billion for 100 million doses


AstraZeneca with Oxford University

In Phase III trials in the UK, Brazil and South Africa

Wuhan Institute of Biological Products C0., LTD

Sinopharm launched Phase II trials in July in UAE
15,000 people participating

Sinovac, China
Phase III in Brazil in July

Murdoch Children's Research Institute
Testing the Tuberculosis vaccine in Phase III

Source of this post:  https://tinyurl.com/y9qjt4re

Covid-19 Vaccine Developer line up 2020-2021

These are the major companies and the research entities that are hopeful of developing a vaccine. The timeline for delivering a solution is in 2020 - 2021 as of now. Who will make it to the finish line?

The table is copied from Nippon Keizai Shinbun. The last column is my addition for my English audience.

Hopefully, we can get past this universal bug.