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Zydus Cadila’s vaccine rollout likely in 2 weeks, final checks on: NTAGI chief – Times of India

PUNE: The much-awaited national rollout of Zydus Cadila’s Covid vaccine, ZyCoV-D, is going to take two more weeks.
“Different batches of ZyCoV-D are undergoing a final round of quality checks at the vaccine testing laboratory in Himachal Pradesh. If everything goes as per plan, the vaccine will be introduced in the immunisation programme by October 15-20,” NK Arora, chairman of the Centre’s Covid working group of the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (NTAGI), told TOI on Sunday.
The three-dose needle-free ZyCoV-D vaccine, manufactured by Ahmedabad-based Zydus Cadila, is the first vaccine in India that has received emergency use authorisation (EUA) for being administered to people aged 12 years and above.
The vaccine is based on the plasmid DNA technology and follows a three-dose regimen with a 28-day gap between each dose.“Since it is a three-dose vaccine, we need to ensure availability of one crore doses each month for the next three months,” Arora said. Developed in partnership with the department of biotechnology, ZyCoV-D is a first-of-its-kind DNA vaccine that produces the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 to elicit an immune response. It is an intradermal vaccine that must be applied using a ‘needle-free injector’, which the manufacturer says will help in reducing side effects.