Amid concerns over Omicron, India’s COVID Task Force chief VK Paul on Tuesday said that there is a potential scenario that “our vaccines may become ineffective in emerging situations” and emphasised the need to be ready to modify the vaccines as per requirement.
He also hoped that COVID in India is possibly moving in the direction of endemicity, where there is a low or moderate level of transmission going on.
We have experienced Delta shock and now the Omicron shock. There is a potential scenario that our vaccines may become ineffective in emerging situations in the wake of the last three weeks of living with Omicron, we have seen how such doubts have come up, some of them may be genuine, we still don’t have the final picture,” he said.
Speaking at an event organised by industry body CII, Paul also emphasised the need for having vaccine platforms that are adaptable quickly with the changing nature of the variants.
“How soon can we create a vaccine which is using the same platform, but is now targeted to the variant of the day. We may have to think about how we go about doing it.”
Moving from the rapid development of generic vaccine, we have to be ready to be able to have a situation where resiliently we are able to modify the vaccines as required. This may not happen every three months but this could happen every year perhaps. Therefore, that needs to be factored in,” Paul said.
