Covaxin: The best vaccine you canâ€™t get

Recently published results of the phase 3 clinical trial for Covaxin shows that it is 93% effective in preventing serious disease.

By Craig Snyder

The recently published results of the phase 3 clinical trial for the Covid-19 candidate vaccine, Covaxin, are an astounding blessing for the world â€” a world in which more people have died from Covid in the first half of 2021 than in all of 2020, with the most dangerous variants so far ravaging the large swaths of humanity where vaccination rates are mostly less than 1%.

Here are key facts about Covaxin, now fully established:

Covaxin is 93% effective in preventing serious disease.

Compared to other publicly available data it shows the best neutralization titers against variants of concern, Delta and Beta, and even out performs on those measures compared with people previously infected with the original COVID-19 strain.

It has an unsurpassed safety profile. With nearly 7,000,000 patients dosed to date, there is no evidence of the rare side effects or complications associated with other vaccines, including facial paralysis, blood clots and heart inflammation.

In the phase 3 study, in addition to showing no sign of serious adverse events, neither did Covaxin make itâ€™s recipients feel sick or miss work after being dosed. More specifically, Covaxinâ€™s adverse events were NO GREATER THAN the placebo group.

Covaxin is the easiest vaccine for transport and storage. It is ideal for stockpiling, with up to three months stability at room temperature and a two-year shelf-life. As such, Covaxin can solve much of the accessibility and waste issues associated with the attempts at distribution of the existing vaccines, particularly in the developing world.

For all of these reasons, Covaxin is the best Covid vaccine Americans canâ€™t (yet) get.

Covaxinâ€™s now fully demonstrated efficacy, and itâ€™s basis on time tested manufacturing processes, used for decades for routine childhood vaccines like polio, means it is the best tool to address the hesitancy of millions of Americans with respect to the MNRA vaccines and a potentially crucial tool for the mass immunization of humanity, outside the few already highly vaccinated countries. That is, in turn, the best protection the already vaccinated can have from the potential emergence of new variants which could continue to erode, or even fully escape from, the protection currently offered by the MRNA vaccines.

Also, because of its basis on the same platform historically used to manufacture childhood vaccines, Covaxin is also likely to prove to be the answer to how to vaccinate Americaâ€™s younger children, many millions of who are still today being deprived of normal social interactions and prevented, behind masks, from seeing the smiles of their friends.

Covaxin is a modern medical miracle. Developed by the brilliant scientific community in India, while making use of a critical new technology component developed in the United States (with taxpayer funds from the National Institutes of Health), this de facto joint product of the worldâ€™s largest democracy and its oldest and wealthiest, must surely not be treated by the Biden Administration as too late to matter in the pandemic, but rather should be seen as arriving just in time to materially help truly end the pandemic in the US and on a global scale.

(*Snyder is President and CEO of Indigo Global Corporation. He is a registered federal lobbyist for Ocugen, the US company holding the exclusive license to develop, distribute and manufacture Covaxin in the US and Canada. This opinion column is intended solely to express Snyderâ€™s personal views.)