Here's an indicative timeline for the Oxford vaccine — from phase-3 trials to the final supply in the market

• While Oxford’s vaccine candidate is in phase III trials, it will still take at least eight more months to make it available to the public, if successful.
  
• Nonetheless, SII will soon start manufacturing about 300 million doses of the unproven coronavirus vaccine, CNN-News 18 reported citing Adar Poonawala.
  
• SII will also begin the actual trial of the coronavirus vaccine on hospital patients in Mumbai and Pune.
  
• The vaccine, if effective, is expected to hit the Indian market in the first quarter of 2021.
  

After promising results from the phase I trial of Oxford’s coronavirus vaccine candidate, Serum Institute of India(SII) is all set to conduct human trials in India.

SII, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, earlier in April, partnered with the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca to mass-produce billions of doses of their potential coronavirus vaccine candidate.

While Oxford’s vaccine candidate is in phase III trials, it will still take at least eight more months to make it available to the public, if successful. Nonetheless, SII will soon start manufacturing about 300 million doses of the unproven coronavirus vaccine, CNN-News 18 reported citing Adar Poonawala.

Oxford vaccine trials in India: Indicative timeline

Here’s what Adar Poonawala, the chief executive officer of SII has proposed —
July 2020: SII to submit their DMCA seeking permission to conduct phase 2 trials. Poonawalla believes SII will be able to “conclude all the design, type, and all the other aspects of the trial” in the next few weeks.

August 2020: On completion of all the aspects of the trials, SII will begin the actual trial of the coronavirus vaccine on hospital patients in Mumbai and Pune.

November 2020: The trials will involve about 5,000 participants and are likely to be completed by November this year.

December 2020: Once the trials are successful, the vaccine will go to Central Research Institute in Kasauli before making it publically available. However, a few million doses will be given to those immunocompromised, like health workers, by December.

March 2021: The vaccine, if effective, is expected to hit the Indian market in the first quarter of 2021. SII, which can produce 800 million doses of vaccine annually, will be able to make 300 million doses in the next four months.

Even if the vaccine is made publicly available by March next year, Poonawalla believes it will take another three to four years to vaccinate everybody in the world with two doses.

Industry stalwarts have raised concerns about the accessibility and easy availability of vaccines. According to Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, the Director, and Founder of Biocon, even after the vaccine is approved, India may not be able to produce more than 10-20 million doses in the first year, which is a negligible amount considering India’s population.

“There are 26 million children born in India every year, but we still struggle to vaccinate even 70% of them. How can we think that we can overnight go and vaccinate 1.4 billion people?. I don’t think vaccines are a major option for India until 2022,” Dr Ramanan Laxminarayan, Director CDDEP earlier told Business Insider India.

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