‘Mixing vaccine is a bad idea’, says Serum Institute’s Cyrus Poonawalla

Chairman of the Serum Institute of India, Cyrus Poonawalla opposed to the mixing of Covid-19 vaccines Covishield and Covaxin that is currently under proposal.

Recently, Drugs Controller General of India had approved a study that will be conducted by the Christian Medical College (CMC), Vellore on mixing of Covaxin and Covishield vaccines and to be tested on 300 healthy volunteers.

The permission for the study was recommended by an expert committee of the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation.

There is no need to mix the doses, and if something goes wrong then there could be a blame game between the two vaccines makers, Poonawalla said.

If anything misfires, “Serum will say that the other vaccine is not good and they (the other vaccine company) will blame us claiming there was an issue with our vaccine,” the chairman of India’s Serum Institute said.

“I think it is very wrong to mix the vaccines and you can quote me,” Poonawalla warned, adding, such a mixing is not at all proven in field trials.

Cyrus Poonawalla made these comment at the Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth in Pune.

The aim of the study is to determine if two different vaccines, one part Covaxin and the other part Covishield can be administered to a single individual.

18 people in Uttar Pradesh who had an inadvertent mix-up of doses showed “better immunogenicity than two doses of the same vaccine,” according to a recent study by the ICMR.

In the same study, it was also discovered that a combination of both vaccine doses was safe, and adverse effects too were similar as a same-vaccine regimen.

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