Can't take nasal vaccine after booster: Covid task force chief

New Delhi: India's nasal vaccine cannot be administered to those who have taken a precaution or booster dose, the head of the country's vaccine task force said.

The nasal vaccine, iNCOVACC, was introduced on the CoWIN platform last week.

"It (nasal vaccine) is recommended as the first booster. For example, if a person has already received a precaution dose, it is not recommended for that person. It is for those who have not yet taken a precaution dose," Dr NK Arora, who has been closely involved with the rollout of vaccines from the onset of the pandemic said.

Meanwhile, several countries are administering a third and even fourth Covid booster shot but India, where many fully vaccinated individuals have not taken even one, is not there yet, say experts while stressing on the need for a structured and systematic response. As Covid gets back on the radar with a surge in China and people worry about another wave in India and whether the government should now allow a second booster shot to add to the two-jab protection, some scientists have called for a reality check.

A fourth shot of a Covid preventive is unwarranted at the moment as most people in the country are yet to receive a third dose and there is no data available on the utility of a second booster for the currently used vaccines, they said. Besides, the situation in India where a large number of people have been exposed to the virus and also been vaccinated is quite different. "There is no reason to expect that the Chinese situation, which is specifically shaped by the zero-Covid policies that the country implemented for almost three years, will predict anything in India," said Satyajit Rath, adjunct faculty at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune. China has been witnessing thousands of cases daily in the last few weeks.

On Wednesday, India logged 188 new coronavirus infections with a daily positivity rate of 0.14 per cent and the weekly positivity rate recorded at 0.18 per cent, the Union Health Ministry said. "The Indian situation, with widespread actual infection in addition to vaccination, is quite different. And the Covid virus is after all spreading and therefore mutating in communities worldwide, not just in China, so new variants are emerging everywhere," Rath told PTI.

"The Omicron wave hit India just about a year ago. If that infection did not trigger enough Omicron-specific immunity none of the vaccines currently available in India would provide further protection," added fellow immunologist Vineeta Bal, also from IISER Pune. The government on Wednesday cautioned that the next 40 days will be crucial as India may see a Covid surge in January. However, Anurag Agrawal, director of the CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) said the likelihood of a new big COVID-19 wave in India is very low. "No quick steps are required right now beyond what is already done," Agrawal told PTI.

"Alertness and tracking of our own data is mostly what is required. There are many trajectories in other countries that we haven't followed as well," he added. Virologist Gagandeep Kang dismissed the chances of a new surge of cases in India in a series of tweets last week.