Confident of COVID-19 vaccine in India by the end of 2020: Health Minister Harsh Vardhan

Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan today expressed confidence that a COVID-19 vaccine in the country will be developed by the end of this year. “One of our COVID-19 vaccine candidates is in the third phase of the clinical trial. We are very confident that a vaccine will be developed by end of this year,” Harsh Vardhan was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.

The Health Minister also said today that India has “best” COVID-19 recovery rate and lowest mortality rate in the world. As far as COVID19 numbers are concerned, he said that India’s fatality rate (1.87%) is really low and we have the best recovery rate (75%) in the world. India has around 1500 testing labs now. It is a great achievement in itself.

Speaking after inaugurating a 10-bed makeshift hospital of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) in Ghaziabad, Harsh Vardhan said that India had started formulating strategy against coronavirus from January 8.

Since then, in the 8 months of battle against the virus, India has the “best recovery rate of 75 per cent”. He said that 2.2 million patients have recovered so far and another 7 lakh are going to be cured soon.

Harsh Vardhan attributed the “success” in fight against the virus to coordinated efforts. “We started with only one testing laboratory in Pune but we scaled up our diagnostic capabilities and strengthened our testing capacity…Today, India has 1,511 testing labs for COVID-19 and on Friday we tested over one million samples… that was about 10.23 lakh samples,” PTI quoted the minister as saying.

India has set up 15,000 dedicated COVID-19 hospitals with 15 lakh beds in a very short time. He also congratulated the NDRF for its contribution in the COVID-19 battle. In a statement, NDRF said that the makeshift hospital has been designed to provide a primary health facility with safety, security and a comfortable living environment. It is a fully air-conditioned pre-fabricated makeshift hospital and equipped with various modern facilities like paramonitors, defibrillators and ECG machines.