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 3,79,257 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 April 12, 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 percent 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.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
