The number of tested samples has increased significantly from a daily average of 230k during the first week of July '20 to approx. 1½ to two million daily samples tested more recently. Samples tested amounted to 629 m by Nov 18 '21. The COVID-19 vaccination programme in India commenced on Jan 16th '21 with approx. 1 152 million vaccine doses administered up to Nov 19 (for more information on vaccination status, refer to the embedded report above).
Five vaccines have so far been approved, ie Covashield (developed by Oxford-AstraZeneca) manufactured by Serum Institure of India, Covaxin (developed by Bharat Biotech in collaboration with ICMR) manufactured by Bharat Biotech, Sputnik V (Gam-COVID-Vac) developed by Russia's Gamaleya National Centre of Epidemiology and Microbiology and Johnson & Johnson's single dose vaccine. The first batches of the ZyCoV-D needle-free plasmid DNA vaccine (first needle-free COVID vaccine in the world) developed by Zydus Cadila were released in Oct '21 for commercial use (approved for the 12-18 year age group in India).
Other COVID-19 vaccines that are in the regulator approval pipeline and/or at an advanced vaccine trial stage include the Serum Institute of India's Novavax vaccine, Bharat Biotech's intranasal vaccine and Gennova Biopharmaceuricals' mRNA vaccine.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has cleared the emergency use of the Covaxin vaccine which became the eighth COVID-19 vaccine to be approved by the United Nations agency.