The world’s biggest Covid-19 vaccination drive is underway in India, with the ambitious goal of vaccinating 300 million people by July. This has been met with a wave of vaccine hesitancy as doubts around Covaxin — approved by New Delhi in January along with the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, known in India as Covishield — continue to spread.
Covaxin was developed locally by Indian vaccine maker Bharat Biotech. Although information around Phase 1 trials was published in The Lancet, Phase 3 trials are still underway.
The lack of published data around Covaxin’s development in some ways mirrors AstraZeneca’s failure at first to publicly disclose a dosing error that saw higher efficacy rates among participants who received a half first dose, sowing public doubt about the vaccine.
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Source: Data deficits around Covaxin contribute to vaccine hesitancy in India