If you want to know which vaccine is better than the other then readout this article.Dr Satyajit Rath, Immunologist, IISER,Pune
How Covshield will work to fight against Covid-9 virus. How Covaxin will work to fight against virus?
SARS-CoV-2 is the virus. COVID-19 is the disease. We know that the Oxford-AstraZenenca-SII vaccine (‘Covishield’) does work to protect against COVID-19 disease. It consists of a weak adenovirus which has the genetic code of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in it. It likely provides protection by triggering the production of antibodies against the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 virus; some of these antibodies will then prevent virus particles from sticking to cells of the body and getting in to create infection.
‘Covaxin’ (ICMR-Bharat Biotech) is a vaccine candidate made simply by treating SARS-CoV-2 virus with chemicals so that it is no longer infectious, but can still trigger an immune response if injected into the body. Therefore, it has many more virus constituents than ‘Covishield’ does. We do not yet know if it provides any protection against COVID-19 disease. If it does, it might be working more or less like ‘Covishield’ does. However, it probably does trigger production of many more kinds of antibodies against virus proteins than ‘Covishield’ does, although it is completely unknown whether these additional antibodies are any use for protection or not.
Which vaccine is better in giving protection from virus?
As I pointed out above, there is good preliminary evidence from worldwide clinical trials that ‘Covishield’ does provide protection against COVID-19 disease. There is as yet no such evidence for ‘Covaxin’ that I am aware of, although it will also, hopefully, provide reasonable protection. In any case, there is no way at all to compare the protective abilities of any two different COVID-19 vaccines as yet, since there are no ongoing careful clinical trials for this that I am aware of.
Do you think these vaccines can fight with new strain?
I assume you mean the so-called “UK variant’ and/or the so-called ‘South Africa variant’. The short answer is that we do not know. It seems quite likely that most current vaccines would still work reasonably well against these variants, but definitive test results are still awaited. In any case, as we begin to use many different vaccines widely, it is likely that virus variants that really cannot be prevented by these vaccines might emerge, and we will then need to develop and use next-generation vaccine variants in the future.
