COVID-19 vaccine trial participants to be issued certificates on CoWIN after long wait

After a long wait, clinical trial participants of Covishield and Covaxin shall now be issued digital COVID-19 vaccination certificates via the CoWIN portal. A total of 1600 and 25,800 volunteers were a part of the phase 3 trials of Covishield and Covaxin respectively. While they received a certificate from the trial sites, they were unable to generate a certificate on CoWIN.

Without this proof of vaccination, these individuals encountered problems at airports, malls and other places where inoculation status plays an important role. Taking to Twitter, Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya thanked the volunteers for their contribution towards novel coronavirus vaccine research. He added that the certificates can be downloaded through the CoWIN portal, Aarogya Setu, Digilocker, or the UMANG application.

COVID-19 vaccination in India

Apart from Covishield and Covaxin, the Drugs Controller General of India has approved Sputnik V, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson's Janssen vaccine, and Zydus Cadila's ZyCoV-D. From June 21 onwards, the Centre started procuring 75% of the vaccine stock and distributing it to the states for free. The vaccination drive is gaining pace with 13.45 crore jabs administered in July- a 12.5% increase against June's 11.96 crore inoculations. As per sources, 40 crore doses of COVID-19 vaccines will be available per month by October. 

This will be possible as a total of 7 vaccines are set to be available by October with Biological E's Corbevax and Gennova's mRNA vaccine likely to get approval soon. The government has already hinted at vaccinating the entire adult population i.e nearly 90 crore people by December itself. In another development, the DCGI approved a study on mixing Covishield and Covaxin. This came after the ICMR observed in a preprint study that a combination of these COVID-19 vaccines elicited better safety and immunogenicity results than two doses of the same vaccine.

In this case, the Christian Medical College, Vellore will conduct the clinical trials on 300 healthy volunteers. The aim of this study will be to ascertain whether two different vaccine doses can be administered to a person instead of the current practice of administering two shots of the same vaccine. A total of 45,64,50,669 persons have been inoculated whereas 13,16,19,940 of them have received the second dose of the vaccine too.