Coronavirus in India LIVE Updates: 'Hybrid immunity gives better protection from Covid than just vaccines'

Coronavirus in India LIVE Updates:- 'Hybrid immunity gives better protection from Covid than just vaccines'

India reported 16,159 new Covid cases in the last 24 hours, 3,073 more than yesterday, according to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare said on Wednesday. The country had recorded 13,086 fresh infections on Tuesday. With this, the number of active cases in the country rose to 1,15,212. Stay with TOI for latest updates:

Canada to throw out 13.6 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine

Canada is going to throw out about 13. 6 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine because it couldn’t find any takers for it either at home or abroad. Canada signed a contract with AstraZeneca in 2020 to get 20 million doses of its vaccine, and 2. 3 million Canadians received at least one dose of it, mostly between March and June 2021. Following concerns in the spring of 2021 about rare but potentially fatal blood clots from AstraZeneca, Canada focused on using its supplies of the mRNA vaccines from  and Moderna.

CoWin set to be platform for universal immunisation, blood & organ donations

So far, nearly 4.8 crore “precaution doses” or booster shots have been administered across the country. The government is also working to repurpose the CoWin platform for universal immunisation, blood donation and organ donation. In May, the Centre relaxed norms for administration of precaution dose and allowed citizens travelling overseas to get the shot before the stipulated nine-month waiting period as required by the guidelines of the destination country.

Union health ministry reduced the gap for the administration of booster or precaution doses to six months from the existing nine months.

The decision to reduce the booster dose gap from 39 weeks to 26 weeks comes after several representations made by vaccine manufacturers, including Serum Institute of India (SII), whose CEO Adar Poonawalla in April had disclosed that the company had 202 million doses of Covishield stocks with it and a reduction in the gap will help move those stocks faster.