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Children with co-morbidities will be a priority in the under-18 vaccination campaign, National Immunization Technical Advisory Group (NTAGI) chairman NK Arora said on Monday. Zydus Cadila’s Covid-19 vaccine, ZyCoV-D, which received emergency use approval last week, is the first vaccine in India to be approved for children over the age of 12.
Arora added that Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin would also be available for use in children by the end of the year, and the regulatory approval process for this could start anywhere between September and October.
“Children with co-morbidities will be preferred when pediatric vaccines are introduced into the system, whether it is ZyCoV-D from Zydus Cadila or Covaxin from Bharat Biotech or whatever the Serum Institute of India is testing. in children, ”Arora said.
Two vaccine candidates have been tested in children in India: Covaxin and ZyCoV-D. The two are also the only of the six now approved in India to be locally developed. Public health experts say children should get vaccinated against the disease when they become eligible to reduce their vulnerability to a possible third wave of infections, as they remain the only completely unvaccinated group.
Government experts will hold discussions on how to introduce the Zydus vaccine, as it is a three-dose intradermal vaccine to be administered in 28-day intervals. “We also need to see how to introduce ZyCoV-D into the vaccination campaign,” Arora said.
Zydus said he also plans to seek approval for a two-dose regimen of his vaccine.
Last week Bharat Biotech Chairman and CEO Krishna Ella and Indian Council of Medical Research-National Institute of Virology (Pune) Director Dr Priya Abraham said Covaxin was likely to be approved. . for kids by September.
“The final phase of our clinical trials is over. We hope that by the end of this month or next month we will get approval to use the vaccine in children. It is the only vaccine in the world that can be given to children between the ages of 2 and 18, ”Ella said in an interview with Doordarshan News on Wednesday.
As Bharat Biotech collaborated with ICMR to develop Covaxin, Abraham also confirmed that the results of the Covaxin trial in children are expected soon.
“I hope that the results (of the trials) will be available very soon. These will be presented to regulators. So by September or right after we may have Covid-19 vaccines for children, ”she added.
The Covaxin trial had 525 child volunteers while the ZyCov-D trials – in phase II / III clinical studies – included 1,000 volunteers in the 12-18 age group.
Arora said another area that is gaining more and more attention is the need for booster doses and studies have been launched in the country to determine this.
“We will be relying strictly on our own locally generated data on the need for booster doses,” he added.
However, experts said the first priority should be to vaccinate all eligible people.
“A reminder may be necessary, but it will happen later; first we need to think about covering all of our high risk population groups and adults, ”said Dr GC Khilnani, former head of the Department of Pulmonary and Sleep Medicine, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi.
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