The union health ministry launched a website that will provide continually updated information on the status of vaccine development and trials in India.

Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan announced the launch of the ‘vaccine web portal’ and the ‘national clinical registry for COVID-19’, developed for the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). The portal will be the source of important information on the status of vaccine development and clinical trials in the country and abroad, according to government statements.

The clinical registry will collect systemic data of symptoms, management protocols, laboratory investigations, the clinical course of the disease and patient outcomes. This “quality real-time data” will serve as a strategic tool in developing appropriate patient management techniques and predicting disease severity. Those who are interested in learning more about India’s progress in vaccine development can visit vaccine.icmr.org.in where they can get regularly updated information on the timeline of vaccines.

With the pandemic still raging on and some countries in the world now coming under the second wave, vaccines are being watched very closely. The health minister gave the assurance that India will have a vaccine by early 2021, saying at least three promising candidates were under development in the country, each in Phase 1,2 and 3 of trials.

He also went on to give updates about how well the country was dealing with the pandemic, pointing to the falling fatality rates and rising recovery rates. Testing had been scaled up phenomenally from just one laboratory at the start to 1,800 today, which cumulatively are conducting up to 15 lakh tests every single day.

Seven months into the first cases reported in the country, the COVID-19 caseload reached 61,45,291 with 70,589 new infections in the past 24 hours, while the death toll reached 96,318. Over 51 lakh people have recovered from the virus, raising the national recovery rate to over 83%. These outnumber the active cases by more than 41.5 lakh. Meanwhile, experts have said that a second wave of the virus is imminent during the festival and winter season.