The primary objective was to get the adult vaccine as children rarely have a severe form of the disease. Once schools reopen, the demand for vaccines for children under 12 may soar.

The vaccine would be first made available to the vulnerable population and eventually, it would be available in the private market for all.

Bharat Biotech is in the middle of conducting a phase 3 trial with 22,000 subjects.

A longer shelf life is critical, given many makers have started manufacturing vaccines and stockpiling them, so as to make them available in the market immediately after approval, reports Sohini Das.

India's first mRNA platform-based vaccine will remain stable at 2-8 degrees Celsius while Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccine needs minus 70 degrees Celsius and Moderna vaccine can remain stable for six months at minus 20 degrees Celsius, reports Sohini Das.

'Our client is suffering due to the ill-effects of the vaccine. He has to be compensated for his suffering. Further, a detailed investigation has to be done on the Covishield vaccine and its side-effects,' says the volunteer's advocate.

By January-February, it's expected to have at least 100 million doses for the Indian government, reports Sohini Das.

From rising prescriptions to the pharma sales force back on the field with full vigour and companies finally finding their feet with the digital marketing strategies - Indian drug makers have shown that medicine sales is certainly a sunshine sector.

The government plans to immunise 30 million people in the first phase, starting February, and by July, the target is to vaccinate 250 million people, reports Sohini Das.

The company has a pipeline of viral vaccines including Zika, dengue, varicella, as well as a potential Covid-19 inoculation.

'SII has started stockpiling the vaccine and now has roughly 40 million doses ready. It is using some of the capacities it had for under development products for the COVID-19 vaccine and by January we will have a capacity to make 100 million doses per month and a stockpile of 200 million doses.'

Siemens Healthineers, one of the largest manufacturers of made-in-India CT scanners, has sold 80-100 such machines in the last 45 days. The medical technology firm typically sells 250 machines in a year.

The first vaccine candidate will be an intra-muscular one, followed by intra-dermal and nasal ones, depending on test results.

Security breach came days after the firm got approval to conduct trials for Covid-19 vaccine candidate Sputnik V.

While there has been no commitment from the government on the procurement of vaccines, initial volumes, or distribution plans, there is a likelihood that the low interest loans may be made available to these players only when the time to scale up manufacturing arises.

Adjuvants may be added to a vaccine to produce more antibodies and longer lasting immunity thus minimising the dose of antigen needed.

The Indian vaccine industry largely feels there are two ways in which vaccine innovation can be spurred - one, get a high price for the product and two, have the government buy a few hundred million doses of the product at a certain price.

A model being considered is to have a combined cold chain approach - where the agricultural cold chain would be combined with vaccine cold chains.

The bouquet of Covid-19 tests that most diagnostic labs are offering include antibody tests (blood tests), rapid antigen tests (point of care tests that detect the presence of an antigen from a nasal or throat swab in case of SARS-CoV-2), and reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests.

The global trials were halted after a study participant suffered a 'potentially unexplained illness, reports Sohini Das.