India to inoculate citizens with Sputnik-V Covid-19 vaccine from next month

Indian ambassador to Russia, Bala Venkatesh Varma on Thursday said that India will start vaccinating its citizens with Russia's Covid-19 vaccine Sputnik V from next month.

"India will start vaccinating citizens with Russia's Sputnik V vaccine early in May," Sputnik quoted Indian ambassador to Russia as saying.

This comes at a time when India is facing a surge in the Covid-19 cases as the country recorded 379,257 new Covid-19 cases in the last 24 hours. This is the highest single-day spike in the cases since the pandemic began last year.

Russia's Sputnik V got approval from the Subject expert committee (SEC) for Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) on 12 April, making it the third Covid-19 vaccine to get clearance in India.

India has become the 60th country to authorise the use of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine against coronavirus. The vaccine is now approved in countries with a total population of 3 billion, or 40 per cent of the world's population.

Sputnik V uses two different vectors for the two shots in a course of vaccination. The efficacy of Sputnik V was determined to be 91.6 per cent as per a published article in the Lancet, one of the world's oldest and most respected medical journals.