New Delhi: Union Health Minister Dr Mansukh Mandaviya said that Bharat Biotech nasal vaccine has been approved as a booster dose. Bharat Biotech’s intranasal COVID vaccine will be available in private centres and will be introduced on CoWIN on Friday (today) evening.

“The Government of India has approved the nasal vaccine. It will be used as a heterologous booster and will be available first in private hospitals. It will be included in COVID vaccination programme from today,” official sources said.

Bharat Biotech’s nasal vaccine, being a needless jab, will be India’s first such booster dose. It can be administered to those above 18 years. Pricing of the vaccine will be decided soon and it will be made available in Government and private facilities.

Currently, Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin, Serum Institutes’s Covishield and Covovax, Russian Sputink V and Biological E Ltd’s Corbevax are listed in the CoWin portal. On Sept. 6, the vaccine maker announced that its iNCOVACC (BBV154), has received approval from Drugs Controller General of India under Restricted Use in Emergency Situation for ages 18 and above.

The Ministry of Science recognised the vaccine as the ‘World’s first intra-nasal vaccine for COVID developed by India’. The vaccine has been developed in partnership with Washington University St Louis, which has designed and developed and evaluated it in preclinical studies for efficacy.

Product development related to preclinical safety evaluation, large-scale manufacturing scale-up, formulation and delivery device development, including human clinical trials, were conducted by Bharat Biotech. The product development and clinical trials were funded in part by the Government of India through the Department of Biotechnology’s, COVID Suraksha programme.