On Monday, Biological E’s Corbevax got emergency approval for the 12-18 age group. This Hyderabad based company’s vaccine has now become the third homegrown vaccine in the country which is approved for children.
Dr NK Arora, Chairman, India’s Covid-19 Working group of National Technical Advisory Group on immunisation (NTAGI), had earlier said that Corbevax is safe and offers good immunity. “Protein subunit vaccines are safe vaccines, the immunogenicity is very good and local reactions are also less as compared to some of the other vaccines like vector vaccine or mRNA vaccine. Another very important dimension about this vaccine is that compared to some of the vector vaccines, the antibody levels are much higher,” he said in an interview.
Dr Arora also mentioned that the Corbevax vaccine worked well on even heterologous groups during clinical trials. “When this is given as a heterologous boost, it works very well. So I would say Corbevax, as a protein subunit vaccine, is a very welcome addition to the Indian vaccine scenario for COVID,” he said.
The production turnaround of Corbevax is very less and it is not very expensive. The government has placed an order with Biological E for five crore doses of the ‘Corbevax’ COVID-19 vaccine with each dose costing ₹145, as per reports.
According to government data, more than 76 million children between 15 and 17 have been vaccinated mainly using Covaxin.
