PM Modi to virtually launch India's COVID-19 vaccination drive on Jan 16

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is all set to virtually launch the COVID-19 pan-India vaccination drive on January 16. The prime minister will also officially launch the Co-WIN app on the same day. Nearly 3 crore healthcare and frontline workers will be receiving the vaccine from next week. Priority will be given to our brave doctors, healthcare workers, frontline workers including Safai Karamcharis.  Then, those above 50 years of age will receive the dose followed by people younger than 50 years of age with associated comorbidities. The total number is estimated at 27 crore. Earlier, Modi in his tweet hailed India's vaccination drive as landmark step

India has authorised two Covid-19 vaccines - indigenous Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin & Serum Institute of India vaccine Covishield for emergency use. Covishield is a a 'virus-vectored' vaccine that uses a weakened version of a chimpanzee common coldvirus that encodes instructions for making proteins from the novel coronavirus to generate an immune response and prevent infection. Researchers claim the vaccine protected against disease in 62% of those given two full doses and in 90% of those initially given a half dose. Covaxin has been derived from a strain of the novel coronavirus isolated by the National Institute of Virology in Pune. Bharat Biotech developed an “inactivated" vaccine at its high-containment facility at Genome Valley in Hyderabad. “Once the vaccine is injected into a human, it has no potential to infect or replicate, since it is a killed virus. It just serves to the immune system as a dead virus and mounts an antibody response towards the virus," Bharat Biotech earlier said.