The number of daily tested samples was around 300 k in Aug '22. Cumulative samples tested reached 923 m on Apr 8 '23. The COVID-19 vaccination programme in India commenced on Jan 16th '21 with approx. 2 075 million vaccine doses administered up to Aug 12 '22 (for more information on vaccination status, refer to the embedded report above).
Eight vaccines have so far been approved, incl. Covashield (developed by Oxford-AstraZeneca) manufactured by Serum Institute 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).
Serum Institute of India's Covovax recombinant nanoparticle protein-based vaccine and Biological E.'s (BioE) Corbevax protein sub-unit vaccine (in collaboration with Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and Baylor College of Medicine) have also been approved for emergency use.
Other COVID-19 vaccines that are in the regulator approval pipeline and/or at an advanced vaccine trial stage include 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.