A health worker prepares a dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, at the city hall in Quezon city, Philippines.
As the Covid vaccination drive is underway in the country, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla on Tuesday said that its vaccine is in the final stages to get approval in India.
Speaking over the progress of Pfizer vaccine approval in India, CEO Albert Bourla said, "I hope very soon we will finalize an agreement with the government."
Meanwhile, a Lancet study has said Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines provide good protection against the Delta variant of coronavirus, which was first identified in India, which doubles the risk of hospitalisation compared with the Alpha variant first found in the UK.
Researchers at Public Health Scotland and the University of Edinburgh, UK, found that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine offered better protection against the Delta variant compared to the Oxford-AstraZeneca preventive, known as Covishield in India.
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The analysis covered the period from April 1 to June 6, 2021, for the demographic distribution of cases.
The team analysed 19,543 confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections over the period of interest, of whom 377 were admitted to hospital for COVID-19 in Scotland.
Around 7,723 community cases and 134 hospitalisations were found to have the Delta variant of coronavirus.
The study found that the Pfizer vaccine offered 92 per cent protection against the Alpha variant and 79 per cent against the Delta strain two weeks after the second dose.
For AstraZeneca's vaccine, there was 60 per cent protection against Delta compared with 73 per cent for Alpha variant, the researchers said.
They also found that two doses of vaccine provide much better protection against the Delta variant compared to a single dose.
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