• The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), Australia’s medicines and medical devices regulator, formally recognised India’s Covaxin vaccine against COVID-19.

• Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin, and AstraZeneca and Oxford University’s Covishield are the two widely used vaccines in India. Australia has already recognised Covishield.

• The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) determined that Covaxin (manufactured by Bharat Biotech, India) and BBIBP-CorV (manufactured by Sinopharm, China) vaccines would be recognised for the purpose of establishing a traveller’s vaccination status.

• Recognition of Covaxin, and BBIBP-CorV, along with the previously announced recognition of Coronavac (manufactured by Sinovac, China) and Covishield (manufactured by AstraZeneca, India), means many citizens of China and India as well as other countries in our region where these vaccines have been widely deployed will now be considered fully vaccinated on entry to Australia.

• This will have significant impacts for the return of international students, and travel of skilled and unskilled workers to Australia. 

What are the features of Covaxin?

• Covaxin has been indigenously developed by Bharat Biotech in collaboration with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR)-National Institute of Virology (NIV).

• It received DCGI approval for phase 1 and 2 human clinical trials in July 2020.

• The vaccine was developed using Whole-Virion Inactivated Vero Cell derived platform technology. Inactivated vaccines do not replicate and are therefore unlikely to revert and cause pathological effects. They contain dead virus, incapable of infecting people but still able to instruct the immune system to mount a defensive reaction against an infection.

• Conventionally, inactivated vaccines have been around for decades. Numerous vaccines for diseases such as Seasonal Influenza, Polio, Pertussis, Rabies, and Japanese Encephalitis use the same technology to develop inactivated vaccines with a safe track record.

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