Biocon's Covid-19 vaccine to be ready by June, says Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw: Report

As billions of people await Covid-19 vaccine in the fight against the pandemic, Biocon's Managing Director Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw is hopeful that the company's vaccine will be ready by June next year, according to a report by Mint.

She, however, pointed out that delivering the vaccine to 1.2 billion Indians will be challenging.

Also read — Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw feels India is dealing with Covid-19 in 'ad-hoc manner'

"My expectation is that the first mRNA vaccines will be approved by the end of the year. But they are not going to be available in India because they require a -80 degree cold chain and that is not something which we can handle here," she told the publication.

She further explained that by January, some of the other vaccines could be approved like AstraZeneca’s or one of our own Indian vaccines like the one by Bharat Biotech.

CORONAVIRUS SPECIAL COVERAGE ONLY ON DH

"If we finish the clinical trials in the next two to three months, even those may be approved by January-February. So I would expect that in Q1FY22 we should have vaccines available in India and other parts of the world. But these will be emergency use authorization (EUA) only because you need to see the durability of responses before you get the full approval," she added.

On Saturday, India reported 53,370 new infections, and 650 fatalities, according to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. This pushed the country's Covid-19 caseload to 78,14,682, death toll to 1,17,956.