Covaxin vaccine works against new UK COVID strain: ICMR

New Delhi, Jan 27: Indian council of medical research (ICMR) has on Wednesday said that Bharat Biotech's Covaxin vaccine has been proved to work against new UK COVID strain.

When the number of people identified as carrying the UK variant of Covid-19 strain in was rising in India, experiments began at the ICMR's National Institute of Virology to assess whether Covaxin can neutralise the new strain.

Covaxin, which has been jointly developed by Bharat Biotech and the ICMR, had received the restricted emergency use authorisation by the apex drug regulator in India along with Oxford University-AstraZeneca's Covishield, being manufactured in India by the Serum Institute of India.

The approval of Covaxin, which is still under phase 3 trial in the country, had triggered a torrent of criticism, but a key reason cited by the drug regulator had said that the REU was being granted in the wake of the mutation in Covid-19 that makes it more transmissible.

Meanwhile, British pharmaceutical company ConserV Bioscience Limited (CBL) claims to have created a COVID-19 vaccine that will work against all kinds of mutations.

According to Daily Mail, CBL has created the vaccine that can allegedly work against all mutant strains, including the ones recently detected in the United Kingdom and South Africa. CBL says that it will able to roll-out the vaccine in a year or so if trials are conducted quickly.