Johnson & Johnson's single-dose COVID-19 vaccine gets approval for emergency use in India

A health ministry official at a recent press conference had clarified that J&J earlier applied for conducting phase-3 clinical trial of its vaccine. "The application was to undertake clinical trial and when we issued relaxed guidelines in which we said if you had approval from other regulatory bodies of other countries, then exemption would be given from clinical trials, and emergency use authorisation would be granted and trial could be continued later on, so now since they did not need it they withdrew that application," the official had said.

Also read | COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker: 49.55 lakh doses administered in India on August 6

In a bid to fast-track emergency approvals for all foreign produced coronavirus jabs, the central government had announced that COVID-19 vaccines which were approved for restricted use by regulators in the US, UK, Europe and Japan, or which were on the World Health Organisation's Emergency Use Listing, would not have to conduct bridging clinical trials in India.

With Johnson and Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine, now there are five vaccines that have been granted Emergency Use Authorisation in India. The other four are Serum Institute's Covishield, Bharat Biotech's Covaxin, Russia's Sputnik V, and Moderna.

(This is a developing copy. Please check back for updates)

Follow our full coverage on COVID-19 here.