Bharat Biotech Successfully Ships Out COVAXIN™ To 11 Cities

Bharat Biotech has announced the successful air-shipment of COVAXIN™, to 11 cities in India in the early hours of Wednesday. Bharat Biotech has also donated 16.5 Lakh doses to the Government of India.

The company also expressed deepest gratitude to the nation, all the clinical trial volunteers, and its partners for making this a successful and milestone public-private partnership for the development of India’s first COVID19- vaccine.

After having received the government purchase order for 55 lakh doses, Bharat Biotech shipped the first batch of vaccines (each vial containing 20 doses) to Ganavaram, Guwahati, Patna, Delhi, Kurukshetra, Bangalore, Pune, Bhubaneswar, Jaipur, Chennai and Lucknow. While some shipments have arrived in the respective cities, others will be delivered later this evening.

COVAXIN™ is a highly purified and inactivated 2 dose SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, manufactured in a Vero cell manufacturing platform with an excellent safety track record of more than 300 million doses.

This vaccine by Bharat Biotech is India’s totally indigenous COVID-19 vaccine developed in collaboration with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) – National Institute of Virology (NIV). This indigenous, inactivated vaccine is developed and manufactured in Bharat Biotech’s BSL-3 (Bio-Safety Level 3) biocontainment facility, one of its kind in the world.

The evaluation of COVAXIN™ has resulted in several unique product characteristics including long term persistence of immune responses to multiple viral proteins, as opposed to only the spike protein, and has demonstrated broad spectrum neutralizing capability with heterologous SARS-CoV-2 strains, thus potentially reducing or eliminating escape mutants.

This vaccine has also shown to generate memory T cell responses, for its multiple epitopes, indicating longevity and a rapid antibody response to future infections. Its most critical characteristic is the demonstrated safety profile, which is significantly lower than several other vaccines with published data. COVAXIN™ is presented in multi dose vials, can be stored at 2-8ºC.