Serum Institute of India (SII) Chairperson Cyrus Poonawalla on Friday said that he was opposed to the idea of mixing Covid vaccines as it might lead to a blame game between the drug manufacturers.
Poonawalla said this while talking to reporters after receiving the Lokmanya Tilak National Award in Pune.
“I am against the mixing of two different vaccines. There is no need to mix two different vaccines,” he said when asked about a recent ICMR study saying that a cocktail of Covishield and Covaxin could get better immunity. “If cocktail vaccines are administered and if the result is not good, then SII may say that another vaccine was not good, vice versa, the other company might say that since you mixed Serum’s vaccine, it did not give desired results,” he added.
Poonawalla has said that claims that India will be fully vaccinated by 2021-end are unreal. Addressing a press conference in Pune, he said that during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s regime Serum Institute of India’s difficulties regarding government permissions are much less and red-tapism has reduced a lot. But this ease in government machinery functioning is only for the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) as the rest of the government mechanism is the same as earlier, he added.
Talking about the booster dose, Poonawalla said that those who have taken the second dose, and a gap of six months has passed, that person should take the third booster dose. He shared that he has had his three doses and his staff of 6,500 have also been given their third booster dose. He said that the third wave won’t be that infectious.
Meanwhile, 40,120 new coronavirus cases were registered in the 24-hour period, taking the cumulative infections to 3,21,17,826. With 585 new deaths, the death toll due to Covid-19 mounted to 430,254.
After 42,295 recoveries were reported in the last 24 hours, India’s Covid active caseload dropped to 3,85,227 and now only constitute 1.2 per cent of the total infections, the lowest since March 2020, according to the Union Health Ministry on Friday.
As per the ministry, India has also achieved the highest ever recovery rate, presently at 97.46 per cent. The daily positivity rate is at 2.04 per cent also remains less than 3 per cent for the last 19 days.
Under Nationwide Vaccination Drive, 52,95,82,956 Covid-19 vaccine doses have been administered so far, while 57,31,574 doses were administered in the last 24 hours.
According to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), 48,94,70,779 samples have been tested for Covid-19, up to 12 August, of which, 19,70,495 samples were tested on Thursday.