India To Get COVID-19 Vaccine By Early 2021: Health Minister

New Delhi: India is likely to have a vaccine against COVID-19 by early next year, Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said in a meeting of a Group of Ministers on Tuesday.

“We are expecting that early next year, we should have vaccine in the country from maybe more than one source. Our expert groups are formulating strategies to plan on how to roll out the distribution of the vaccine in the country,” the minister was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.

Earlier, the Chief Scientist of World Health Organization (WHO), Soumya Swaminathan, had also said that a vaccine will be ready for registration by the end of 2020 or early next year at the earliest.

“As you know, we have about 40 vaccine candidates now in some stage of clinical trials, and 10 of them are in the phase three trials, which are the late-stage clinical trials, which will tell us about both the efficacy and the safety,” she had said.