India has approved the emergency use of the Johnson & Johnson single-injection coronavirus vaccine to speed up its vaccination campaign, fearing a new wave of infections.
Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya said the move would bolster the fight against the pandemic in India, where at least 200,000 people died in a brutal wave, which lasted two months until mid-June.
Read also: India refuses to count its millions of deaths from Covid-19
“
India is expanding its vaccine basket!
Johnson & Johnson's single dose COVID-19 vaccine is approved for emergency use in India,
”the minister said on Twitter.
No indication has been given on when these vaccine doses will be sent to India.
Second most contaminated country in the world
India, a country of 1.3 billion people, has so far inoculated 500 million doses of the vaccine, but just 8% of the population has received two injections.
India remains the second most affected country after the United States, with more than 32 million confirmed cases and 427,000 deaths.
But with no reports of all Covid-19 cases, experts believe the numbers are much higher.
These experts also warned of the dangers of the slow vaccination rate putting India at risk of a new wave of infections.
The number of new cases and deaths has started to rise again in the past two weeks.