A sharp drop in the number of covid cases may handicap vaccine developers that are likely to start testing the effectiveness of their shots and potentially delay their approvals in India, where the first phase of the world’s largest immunization programme is set to start next week. Testing the effectiveness of vaccines, which is established in phase 3 of clinical trials, requires volunteers who have been infected by the coronavirus. Unless they do the trial in, say, Kerala, where daily cases are still high, it will take a lot of time for some of the participants across the placebo and vaccine arm (of the trial) to be infected. This means that it will take longer to get efficacy readings for the next batch of vaccines, said VineetaBal, professor of biology at Pune’s Indian Institute of Science Education and Research.
While the decline in daily new cases is definitely a positive development, it becomes harder for vaccine developers to conduct large-scale studies. With the daily coronavirus infections dropping to less than 20,000 in the country from nearly 100,000 in September, studying the effectiveness of the vaccine is likely to be dragged out.
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