Indian Health and Family Welfare, Minister Harsh Vardhan has come out to say that the nation would have a vaccine against the coronavirus disease by early next year.

He recently revealed that India is also making effective efforts for vaccines just like other countries.

According to him, three candidate vaccines have reached phase one, phase two, and phase three stages already, and an expert group under the guidance of Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) is looking into them currently.

He added that Indian pharmaceutical companies — Bharat Biotech, Serum Institute, Zydus Cadila, Panacea Biotec, Indian Immunologicals, Mynvax, and Biological E — are among the domestic firms developing the COVID-19 vaccine.

His words, “We are expecting that our country will have COVID vaccine by the early next year,”

“India is also making effective efforts for vaccines just like other countries.”

“In India, among the candidate vaccines, three have reached phase one, phase two and phase three stages.”

“An expert group under the guidance of Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) is looking at it and we have advanced planning in place,”

“Indian pharmaceutical companies — Bharat Biotech, Serum Institute, Zydus Cadila, Panacea Biotec, Indian Immunologicals, Mynvax and Biological E — are among the domestic firms developing the COVID-19 vaccine. Some of them have already entered the phase 3 trials.”

What do you think?

Coronaviruses are a group of related viruses that cause diseases in mammals and birds. In humans, coronaviruses cause respiratory tract infections that can be mild, such as some cases of the common cold (among other possible causes, predominantly rhinoviruses), and others that can be lethal, such as SARS, MERS, and COVID-19. Symptoms in other species vary: in chickens, they cause an upper respiratory tract disease, while in cows and pigs they cause diarrhea. There are yet to be vaccines or antiviral drugs to prevent or treat human coronavirus infections.

Coronaviruses constitute the subfamily Orthocoronavirinae, in the family Coronaviridae, order Nidovirales, and realm Riboviria. They are enveloped viruses with a positive-sense single-stranded RNA genome and a nucleocapsid of helical symmetry. The genome size of coronaviruses ranges from approximately 27 to 34 kilobases, the largest among known RNA viruses. The name coronavirus is derived from the Latin corona, meaning “crown” or “halo”, which refers to the characteristic appearance reminiscent of a crown or a solar corona around the virions (virus particles) when viewed under two-dimensional transmission electron microscopy, due to the surface covering in club-shaped protein spikes.

Human coronaviruses were first discovered in the late 1960s. The earliest ones discovered were an infectious bronchitis virus in chickens and two in human patients with the common cold (later named human coronavirus 229E and human coronavirus OC43). Other members of this family have since been identified, including SARS-CoV in 2003, HCoV NL63 in 2004, HKU1 in 2005, MERS-CoV in 2012, and SARS-CoV-2 (formerly known as 2019-nCoV) in 2019. Most of these have involved serious respiratory tract infections.