Covid Vaccine in India: Pfizer seeks urgent approval

Pfizer Inc has applied for emergency use authorisation of its coronavirus vaccine in India, media said yesterday, the first to do so in a country with the world's second-highest number of infections.

The US company, whose vaccine was recently approved by the British government, has written to the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI), CNN-News18 reported citing a government source.

Officials at the DCGI and the health ministry did not respond to requests for comment. A government official, however, told Reuters that no application had been received as of Saturday night.

Pfizer could not immediately be reached.

Indian officials have said they are pinning their hopes mainly on locally tested vaccines instead of those developed by Pfizer and Moderna Inc.

The Pfizer shot needs to be stored at minus 70 degrees Celsius (-94 F) or below, temperatures that most Indian cold storages cannot reach.

India has reported more 9.57 million Covid-19 cases, behind only the United States, with nearly 140,000 deaths.

In China, provincial governments are placing orders for experimental, domestically made coronavirus vaccines, though health officials have yet to say how well they work or how they may reach the country's 1.4 billion people.

Developers are speeding up final testing, the Chinese foreign minister said during a UN meeting last week.

Even without final approval, more than 1 million health care workers and others in China who are deemed at high risk of infection have received experimental vaccines under emergency use permission. There has been no word on possible side effects.

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II will receive the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine within weeks, reports said yesterday, as the biggest immunisation programme in UK history begins next week.

The monarch, 94, and her 99-year-old husband Prince Philip are in line to get the jab early in the rollout, which gets underway tomorrow, due to their age and will not receive preferential treatment, several newspapers reported.

Britain's most senior royals will "let it be known" they have been given the inoculations "as a powerful counter to the anti-vaccination movement," the Sunday Times said.

The Mail added they hope "to encourage more people to take up the vital jab".

The queen has spent much of the pandemic in self-isolation in Windsor because of her age, and will this year forego her traditional family Christmas at her Sandringham estate in eastern England with other royals.

A Buckingham Palace spokeswoman declined to comment on the vaccination reports, noting "medical decisions are taken personally".

'RISE TO THE CHALLENGE'

Britain has pre-ordered 40 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in total, and is set to receive an initial batch of 800,000 to kickstart tomorrow's rollout.

Elderly care home residents and their carers will be the very first in line, followed by those aged 80 and over and frontline health and care staff.

Other elderly people and the clinically extremely vulnerable will be next, with the rest of the population then prioritised by age.

The first doses were transported to the UK this week from a Pfizer plant in Belgium and will begin to arrive at dozens of "hospital hubs" nationwide by today.

Among those first to be inoculated will be the eldest patients already attending hospital as an outpatient, those being discharged home and others invited in.

The effort faces significant obstacles because this vaccine must be stored at -70 degrees Celsius (-94 degrees Fahrenheit).

However, it can be kept for up to five days at 2-8 degrees Celsius, reports AFP.

"Despite the huge complexities, hospitals will kickstart the first phase of the largest-scale vaccination campaign in our country's history from Tuesday," Stephen Powis, national medical director of the state-run National Health Service (NHS), said.

"Hardworking staff will once again rise to the challenge to protect the most vulnerable people from this awful disease," he added, noting the NHS had "a strong record" in vaccine delivery.