Foreign ministry to fly over 60 foreign envoys to Hyderabad for Covid vaccine briefing

The diplomats will be taken to the Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech and Biological E for an interaction with scientists on the Covid-19 vaccine

Updated on: Dec 8, 2020, 19:28:36 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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The Centre will tomorrow fly more than 60 heads of foreign missions to Bharat Biotech and Biological E the two biotech companies that are working on a Covid-19 vaccine, people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday. The envoys would be briefed about the progress made by scientists who are working on the vaccine.

FILE PHOTO: An employee in personal protective equipment (PPE) removes vials of AstraZeneca's COVISHIELD, coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine from a visual inspection machine inside a lab at Serum Institute of India, Pune, India, November 30, 2020. REUTERS/Francis Mascarenhas/File Photo (REUTERS)

Bharat Biotech is among the three companies to have sought emergency authorisation from the government for use of the Covid vaccine. The Serum Institute of India and Pfizer India are the other two.

Bharat Biotech, which has developed an Indian vaccine in collaboration with government’s National Institute of Virology, is at present in phase III trials, with over 25,000 volunteers. It uses an inactivated virus to elicit an immune response in people.

The foreign ministry had earlier proposed to include Pune-based Serum Institute of India in the itinerary but later dropped the idea.

The foreign ministry had last month briefed diplomats from 190 countries and international organisations about the steps taken by India to control the disease. It had then promised to organise visits to institutions engaged in Covid-19 related research and vaccine development programmes.

Union health secretary Rajesh Bhushan told reporters that a decision on the approval request for the three vaccines could be taken in a few weeks.

In all, six vaccines including Biological E.are in trial stages.

Biological E, one of the two companies to interact with the diplomats, is among the six vaccine candidates that are in trial stages in India. Biological E has started early phase 1 and 2 human trials of its Covid-19 vaccine candidate.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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