India's indigenously-developed COVID vaccine Covaxin may soon receive Emergency Use Listing by the World Health Organisation, eventually enabling its recipients to travel abroad without mandatory quarantine, NITI Aayog's Member, Health, V.K. Paul said on 15 September.

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Data sharing and data evaluation are going on and a positive decision may come soon, he said. "The data sharing and data evaluation have been going on through multiple reviews and we are close to a decision point. "We must give time to WHO to make their decisions based on science. However, we hope that these decisions can be taken quickly because people who are receiving Covaxin have certain imperatives of travel. Most of us, who chose the concurrency, is important in terms of licensure. We are hoping for an early decision," Dr Paul said.

"We believe that a positive decision could be coming in, before the end of the month," he added. In August, Indian Health Minister also met WHO Chief Scientist Dr Soumya Swaminathan and held discussions over the WHO approval of Covaxin. The vaccine's developer Bharat Biotech has submitted its Phase 3 clinical trials data that demonstrated 77.8 per cent efficacy to the Subject Expert Committee (SEC) of the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO). The WHO has so far approved COVID-19 vaccines by Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Johnson and Johnson, Moderna, and Sinopharm.