The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) on Friday said that it would conduct a study soon to find out whether the vaccine for tuberculosis — bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) — could be effective for the management of the Coronavirus patients.
While clinicians in at least six countries including US and Italy are running trials that involve giving frontline health workers and elderly people the BCG vaccine to see whether it can provide some level of protection against the Covid-19, the ICMR is looking to generate “more concrete evidence”.
“We won't recommend the BCG vaccine even to the healthcare workers till we have any definitive results,” said Dr Raman R Gangakhedkar, senior scientist from the ICMR, a health research wing of the Union Health Ministry.
Replying to a question on the use of the BCG vaccine to fight COVID-19 during daily media briefing, Dr Gangakhedkar said: "ICMR will begin a study next week. Till we don't have definitive results from this, we won't recommend the BCG vaccine even for health workers."
Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) is a vaccine primarily used against tuberculosis. In the countries where tuberculosis or leprosy is common, one dose is recommended in healthy babies as close to the time of birth as possible.
"We don't have enough evidence to take an official position on the BCG vaccine in COVID-19. It can't even stop TB but it can only protect from severity. It is an immunomodulator, effective for 15 years," he added.
Dr Gangakhedkar said that coronavirus has been in India for three months. "The mutation doesn't happen too quickly. Whatever vaccine comes out now will work in the future as well if the virus mutates," he added.
According to the ICMR, of the 28,340 tests COVID-19 done on Thursday, 23,932 were conducted at 183 labs under the public lab and rest were done in the private labs.
Lav Aggarwal, Joint Secretary, Union Health Ministry who was also at the press briefing, shared that Indian scientists and researchers are working on vaccine development and that by next month, 10 lakh indigenously developed RT-PCR kits would be manufactured.
He said the government is working with global partners on the vaccine development front and introducing it for the general public. Although it is a time-consuming process, "we are accelerating the processes involved."
He said the RT-PCR kit manufacturing work is in progress. By May, we can produce around 10 lakh kits. "We are also working on manufacturing 10 lakh rapid antibody detection kits", he said. The real time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (real time RT-PCR) test is considered one of the most accurate lab methods to detect, track and study coronavirus.” Agarwal said that top government organizations – the Council for Scientific and Industrial Search, Department of Biotechnology and Science and Technology, and Department of Atomic Energy -- have also contributed in the fight against coronavirus by providing 30 labs to enhance the overall testing for the viral infection.
The Ministry said it has prioritised the indigenous manufacturing of new rapid and accurate diagnostic kits, which can provide results in 30 minutes.
"Innovative pooling strategies, limited tested to increase large numbers of people; we are focusing our efforts to increase indigenous synthesis of critical components for domestic kit production. We are also working viral sequencing, to epidemiologically identify mutation, and vaccine development and work is in progress to develop RNA-based vaccines", said Agarwal.
"Under a multi-pronged strategy we are working, taking into account India''s indigenous knowledge to boost the immune system. We have partnered with WHO to determine different drug therapies. A scientific task force is working to re-evaluate the existing drugs, and if required, these drugs could be re-purposed for COVID-19 use. We are working on the indigenous synthesis of anti-viral drugs", said Agarwal.