Bharat Biotech announced a successful air-shipment of Covaxin to 11 cities in India in the early hours of Wednesday. It has also donated 16.5 lakh doses of the Covid vaccine to the Government of India.

The company has expressed deepest gratitude to the nation, all the clinical trial volunteers, and its partners for making this a successful and milestone public-private partnership for the development of India's first Covid-19 vaccine.

After receiving the government purchase order for 55 lakh doses, Bharat Biotech shipped the first batch of the Covid vaccine (each vial containing 20 doses) to Ganavaram, Guwahati, Patna, Delhi, Kurukshetra, Bengaluru, Pune, Bhubaneswar, Jaipur, Chennai and Lucknow. While some shipments have arrived in respective cities, others will be delivered later this evening.

Covaxin is a highly purified and inactivated two-dose SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, manufactured in a Vero cell manufacturing platform with an excellent safety track record of more than 300 million doses. This vaccine by Bharat Biotech is a totally indigenous Covid-19 vaccine developed in collaboration with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), National Institute of Virology (NIV).

This indigenous, inactivated vaccine has been developed and manufactured in Bharat Biotech's BSL-3 (Bio-Safety Level 3) biocontainment facility, one of its kind in the world. The evaluation of Covaxin has resulted in several unique product characteristics including long-term persistence of immune responses to multiple viral proteins, as opposed to only the spike protein, and has demonstrated broad-spectrum neutralising capability with heterologous SARS-CoV-2 strains, thus potentially reducing or eliminating escape mutants.

This vaccine has also shown to generate memory T cell responses, for its multiple epitopes, indicating longevity and rapid antibody response to future infections. Its most critical characteristic is the demonstrated safety profile, which is significantly lower than several other vaccines with published data. Covaxin is presented in multi-dose vials and can be stored at 2º-8º C.

The product development and clinical trial data so far have generated five publications, which have been submitted to international peer-reviewed journals, four of which have been accepted and will be published soon. The publication of Phase II trial data is undergoing the peer review process.