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India's contribution will be critical to fighting covid-19: Harsh Vardhan
Oct-22-2020

Health Minister Harsh Vardhan has said that India's contribution will be critical to fighting coronavirus disease (covid-19) pandemic, especially when it comes to making vaccines for the whole world. He also assured that the government has accorded top-most priority to research and manufacturing to ensure that the vaccine reaches the last person.

The minister said that the National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration is working on all aspects, besides designing innovative approaches to distribute vaccines in rural and remote regions. He also said the present research agenda for covid-19 has been to provide an affordable vaccine as well as to ensure its equitable distribution. He noted that at present, three Indian pharma companies in partnership with foreign or domestic research institutes are expediting the trials of vaccine. He pointed out that the biggest benefit that India has is that it has a robust immunization program in place and it is also implementing the largest immunization program of the world, with nearly 27 million newborns targeted annually.

Vardhan further said ‘we have an established infrastructure for supply, storage and delivery of vaccines to the last mile under our Universal Immunization Program as part of which we are administering around 600 million doses to children every year. The strength of these experiences in the vaccination landscape, our best practices and the robustness of our health delivery system will be leveraged and augmented using a strong IT backbone to ensure that this humongous national mission of vaccinating the identified priority groups with COVID-19 vaccine is achieved in a timely manner’.

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