A technical committee of experts from Mexico on Friday gave its favorable opinion on the authorization of the Covaxin vaccine from the Indian pharmaceutical company Bharat Biotech.
The report of the Committee on New Molecules will be sent to the sanitary authorization commission of the Federal Commission for the Protection of Sanitary Risks, which usually follows these recommendations.
Preliminary results from end-stage testing by the manufacturer show that its COVID-19 vaccine is about 81 percent effective in preventing illness from coming into contact with the coronavirus.
The Bharat Biotech vaccine was licensed by India in January amid controversy, as it did not wait for tests to confirm that it was effective. Since then, 1.3 million doses have already been applied in the Asian country.
Health workers have been reluctant to receive it, and health experts are concerned that the decision not to wait for test results has contributed to broadening the population’s doubts about inoculation. Bharat Biotech has already signed an agreement with Brazil to supply 20 million doses by September.
It would be the sixth vaccine authorized for use in Mexico, which has received relatively small amounts of each. The country has only applied some 2.7 million doses of all of them, a small amount considering that it has 126 million inhabitants.
Meanwhile, Mexico reports more than 190 thousand deaths from COVID. Yet the country does so little testing that government surplus death figures suggest that the actual number was well above 220,000 in early January, the last date those figures are available. Nearly 6,800 new cases were registered on Friday, bringing the total to more than 2.1 million.
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