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A wave of government ministers in India this week got vaccinated with a locally produced COVID-19 jab from Bharat Biotech after Prime Minister Narendra Modi took the shot on Monday morning. The injections came before Bharat Biotech announced an efficacy figure for the first time on Wednesday. The company said in a press release on Wednesday evening that its vaccine is 81% effective in preventing COVID-19 infections after conducting an interim analysis of phase III trial data.
“Got my jab. For the curious, it was [Bharat Biotech’s] #Covaxin,” Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s minister of external affairs, said on Twitter on Monday evening. “Felt secure, will travel safely.”
India’s government approved Covaxin, the COVID-19 vaccine produced by Bharat Biotech, in January even though the efficacy of the vaccine was unknown. Bharat Biotech’s vaccine is likely safe, according to Phase I trial data from a small group of volunteers that the company published in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet. But until Thursday, Bharat Biotech did not publish data saying that the vaccine is effective in preventing COVID-19 infections.
Still, the vaccine seems to have won the full support of the Indian government.
“Made-in-India vaccines are 100% safe,” Indian Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said after receiving the vaccine on Tuesday.
In his statement about getting the vaccine, Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi also said it was safe. “I appeal to all those, who are eligible to take the vaccine, to get vaccinated and make India Corona free,” Abbas tweeted after getting the vaccine Tuesday.
Bharat Biotech said Thursday that it reached the 81% figure because 36 people got infected in a placebo group versus seven in the group that got vaccinated in its 25,800 person trial. The company said that it will continue the trial until there are 130 confirmed COVID-19 cases among participants.
“Today is an important milestone in vaccine discovery, for science and our fight against coronavirus,” Bharat Biotech chairman Krishna Ella said in the statement. “With today’s results from our Phase 3 clinical trials, we have now reported data on our COVID-19 vaccine from Phase 1, 2, and 3 trials.”
Before the announcement, it was unclear how much the Indian public trusted Bharat Biotech’s jab in comparison to India’s other approved vaccine, which was developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University and is being produced locally by the Serum Institute of India. The AstraZeneca jab is 62% effective against COVID-19 infection.
Government data shows that 12% of the 12 million Indians who have been vaccinated so far have received the Bharat Biotech jab, according to Reuters; the rest received AstraZeneca doses. In total, India plans to inoculate 300 million of its 1.4 billion people with COVID-19 vaccines by August.
Before Bharat Biotech announced the efficacy figure, scientists were skeptical of India’s decision to roll out and promote a then-unproven vaccine and reject another, Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, which was proven effective.
“Why [do] I never comment on Covaxin vaccine?” asked Faheem Younus, chief of infectious diseases at University of Maryland Upper Chesapeake Health, on Twitter. “Because Phase III trials are not published. I like to work with data.”
This story was first published before the efficacy results of the Covaxin vaccine. It was updated at 11:45 a.m. ET to reflect the newly released results.