New Delhi: The hot weather-tolerant Kovid-19 vaccine being developed in India is capable of producing strong antibodies against other forms of coronavirus including Delta and Omicron. This has been revealed in studies done on rats. Cold storage of this vaccine is not required. The vaccine, being developed by the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and biotech start-up company MyVax, uses a part of the viral spike protein called the receptor-binding domain (RBD).
A team of researchers, including researchers from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), said most vaccines require cooling to be effective. This heat-tolerant Kovid-19 vaccine can be kept at 37 °C for four weeks and 100 °C for 90 minutes.
A vaccine tested on mice
In comparison, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, known in India as Covishield, needs to be stored in a temperature range of 2 to 8 °C, while the Pfizer vaccine requires a temperature of minus 70 °C. The study said that testing of this vaccine on mice found that it is capable of producing strong antibodies against other forms of coronavirus, including Delta and Omicron.
975 new cases of Covid-19 came in India, 4 infected died
Meanwhile, with the arrival of 975 new cases of Covid-19 in India in a day, the number of people infected so far in the country has increased to 4,30,40,947. This information has been given in the data released by the Union Health Ministry. According to the ministry, the number of patients under treatment in the country has increased to 11,366. According to the data updated by the Ministry of Health at 8 am on Saturday, the death of four more infected people has increased the number of people who lost their lives to the epidemic to 5,21,747.
The ministry said that the number of patients under treatment in the country is only 0.03 percent of the total cases, while the national rate of those who are infection-free is 98.76 percent. According to the data, there has been an increase of 175 in the number of patients under treatment in the last 24 hours. The ministry said that the daily infection rate in the country is 0.32 percent, while the weekly infection rate has been recorded at 0.26 percent. According to the data, the number of cured patients has increased to 4,25,07,834, while the death rate due to infection is 1.21 percent.
