The Challenges of Developing a Safe and Effective COVID-19 Vaccine

By Mr. Neeraj Mehta, CEO, Immunifyme

COVID-19 which is caused by the virus named SARS-COV-2, originated from China and quickly spread across the globe. WHO recognized it as a Pandemic which has till today infected 15.2 million people worldwide and more than 620 thousand deaths. In India it is spreading wider and till now about 1.24 million people are infected and nearly 30 thousand people have lost their lives.

It is a dreaded disease and the whole world is looking for a vaccine to treat the COVID-19 effectively and control the spread of the disease. While many companies are in the race to produce a vaccine, few have already gone into various Phases of human trials. Moderna's mRNA-1273 and Oxford-AstraZeneca's Covid vaccine are ahead and have proven the safety and efficacy of the vaccine.

So now that we know, the vaccines are definitely on the way, the world will face a different kind of challenges. 

Few of the challenges which I see are:

1. Avoiding counterfeited vaccines 

Fake Vaccines! Yes, COVID-19 is a dreaded pandemic and everyone is looking forward for a vaccine. Thanks to Serum Institute of India and Adar Poonawalla that we have already started the production of COVID-19 vaccine in the name of Covishield for India and the world.

2. Vaccine Distribution

Covishield is not a Routine Vaccine: The world will need billions of doses to be manufactured in order for the vaccine to be available in all parts of the World, thankfully Serum Institute of India is one of the only few companies in the world to have the capability to manufacture this volume of doses. GAVI too has tie-up with UPS. UPS has committed a US$ 3 million in new funding and in-kind logistics support spanning two years, provided by UPS and The UPS Foundation to Gavi. This initiative will help COVID-19 vaccine's equitable and timely distribution. However, India will still need its own logistics in order for the vaccine to reach to everyone. We must ensure it is accessible to each person in India.

3. Surveillance during Vaccination and monitoring and follow-up for upcoming doses

Monitoring of people who would have received the vaccine: This is extremely crucial for us to monitor people who would have received the vaccine, in order to ensure they also receive the follow up dose and how are they doing in the long run after receiving the vaccine.

While it is a great thing that vaccine will be available soon, but we should be prepared for a long wait as well. The initial supplies will be extremely limited and the frontline health-care professionals will get the first access followed by those people who are vulnerable to serious illness. To make this vaccine reach each and everyone, India will have to work hand in hand with other nations.

Bayer Partners with ITC e-Choupal 4.0 to Support Farmers Across Karnataka

Crop Protection

* Farmers can order Bayer’s Crop Protection products on ITC’s e-Choupal 4.0 platform

* Partnership to benefit 42,000+ farmers in Mysore region

* Initiative to improve access to good-quality agri-inputs and timely agronomic advisory

Bayer CropScience Limited is partnering with ITC Limited’s Agri Business Division to extend the reach of its Crop Protection products through ITC’s e-Choupal 4.0 platform. The partnership has commenced as a pilot project in Mysore, Karnataka and will gradually be expanded to other geographies across India.

With Covid-19 disrupting farming operations and on-farm advisory, this initiative will help farmers avail agri-inputs and digital advisory on a timely basis. ITC & Bayer are jointly training and on-boarding retailers in the Mysore region, to cater to farmers’ orders placed through the e-Choupal 4.0 platform. Field Officers from both companies have also received extensive training on product knowledge and technical advisory to support farmers.

Over 42,000 ITC farmers, covering 60,000 hectares across 1,100 villages in Mysore region will benefit from the partnership with Bayer. Farmers can place their order for Bayer products through the e-Choupal 4.0 platform and track their orders. Farmers without access to smartphones can place their orders online with assistance from Bayer & ITC’s field staff or even place offline orders.

Speaking about the partnership with ITC, D. Narain, CEO & MD of Bayer CropScience Limited, said, “Farmers in India often struggle to get access to agri-inputs, training and advisory under one roof. Lack of modern technologies and good agricultural practices hamper crop productivity and farm profitability. At Bayer, we are looking at meaningful collaborations to create greater value for farmers and the entire agri eco-system. Bayer’s partnership with ITC aims to offer tailored solutions, enabling farmers to achieve better harvests and progress to sustainable agriculture. We also plan to leverage ITC’s extensive rural reach to create capacity building for adoption of greater product stewardship and traceability of produce.”

Elaborating on the partnership with Bayer, Sanjiv Rangrass of ITC Limited, who has been driving the

e-Choupal 4.0 initiative said, “While agronomic advisory is essential to the farmer, information on best practices alone is not sufficient to improve their profitability. Farmers routinely battle adulteration, product non-availability and arbitrary pricing. Consequently, they are not able to make informed purchasing decisions. Therefore, it is essential to provide farmers with access to the right set of products and services. ITC’s e-Choupal 4.0 platform aims at providing on-demand crop advisory linked to products & services across the value chain. ITC’s collaboration with Bayer will enable access to quality inputs by digitalizing the local marketplace eco-system for farmers. This will leverage Bayer’s expertise in agri-inputs and ITC’s deep-rooted linkages with farmers through the e-Choupal 4.0 platform, thereby creating value and a brand of trust for the farmers.”

Will Google, Yahoo and Microsoft collaborate to clean up web?

In a rare instance of collaboration among otherwise fierce rivals, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft said they would support a new web standard that will allow millions of publishers to remove duplicate pages from their websites. As a result, search engines would be able to make their search results more comprehensive.

"There is a lot of clutter on the web and with this, publishers will be able to clean up a lot of junk," said Matt Cutts, an engineer who heads Google's spam fighting efforts, the New York Times reported.

"I think it is going to gain traction pretty quickly," said Cutts.

The problem is the following: Many web publishers, especially those that have voluminous sites, like e-commerce companies, have multiple URLs that all point to the same page. This confuses search engines, sometimes causing them to index the same page multiple times. As much as 20 percent of URLs on the web may be duplicates, according to some estimates.

Engineers at Google came up with a simple way for web publishers to indicate when a URL is a duplicate, and if so, which is the principal, or "canonical," URL that search engines should be indexing. Yahoo and Microsoft, the no. 2 and no. 3 search engines, have agreed to support the same standard.

"We are happy that everyone is going to support the same implementation," said Nathan Buggia, a lead programme manager at Microsoft. "This is a clear benefit for publishers as it gives them an opportunity to get more exposure through search engines."

All search engines have developed technologies to detect duplicates that are more or less effective. The so-called Canonical Link Tag, as the standard is known, should make it easier for both publishers and search engines to address the problem, NYT reported Thursday.

"It is an important step because all the search engines are coming out with it," said Priyank Garg, director of product management for web search at Yahoo.

Agencies

APAC big market for collaboration tools: Cisco

New Collaboration Portfolio

The new collaboration portfolio is designed to help companies accelerate business processes, increase productivity and speed innovation With the global recession having a major impact on the US companies, Cisco, the leaders in routers and switches sees a high growth in the Asia-Pacific region for the new collaboration portfolio that helps companies accelerate business processes, increase productivity and speed innovation.

Targeting the current $34 billion global market for what are called collaboration products, Cisco said it will target users, particularly on the move, delivering the applications across platforms like Windows, Mac OS, and even mobile phones running on Symbian, BlackBerry and Windows OS. The market for such tools and services is projected to grow to $48 billion by 2011.
Reports indicate that it is slated as the fastest growing advanced technology in Cisco's product portfolio. The new collaboration portfolio is now looking at emerging countries in Asia like India, China, Middle East, Russia, South Africa as high growth markets. The company has initially rolled out 40 products and 800 capabilities that are very significant for the Indian market.

Talking to CIOL, Manjula Talreja, VP, strategy & business operations, software group, Cisco said, "even though the foundation for this product was laid in the US and so has about 70 percent market share, still more than 30 percent comes from the emerging markets spread across Asia-Pac, Africa, South America. But in the coming years it is likely that it will become a 50:50 ration."

The US slowdown could help increase the numbers in the emerging markets to achieve this target sooner, says Talreja.

The networking giant said the new set of tools would enable enterprises and executives to work across platforms and devices seamlessly wherever they are.

The company is tapping on companies in particular verticals like IT, ITES, manufacturing, government, services, retail and heathcare for deployment these advanced technologies.
The new set of tools comprising Cisco Unified Communications, Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx Connect, are designed to integrate with existing IT infrastructure, web services and business application to allow users customise applications and services.

The new set of collaboration products use the network as a platform to inter-operate with business applications, communication devices and web-based tools.

"Cisco collaboration strategy is a fusion of unified communication technology, video, telepresence and web 2.0 technologies that will accelerate business processes and speed up innovation," said Ranajoy Punja, VP, business development advanced technologies, Cisco India, SAARC.

The acquisition of the Santa Clara-based WebEx Communication Inc followed by and calendaring company PostPath Inc and IM firm Jabber Inc helped Cisco roll out the current products.
"Collaboration is the next phase of Internet and the centre of this phase is the network. Our network platform uses open-standards protocols to expose critical collaboration services like instant messaging," said Don Proctor, senior VP, software group, Cisco.

He said the portfolio will use this network architecture to create an integrated collaboration experience that has everything from simple text messaging to Cisco TelePresence sessions.