Haryana Health Minister Anil Vij, who was currently undergoing treatment for Covid-19 infection, was on Tuesday admitted to Gurugram's Medanta Hospital in a critical condition, officials said. He is getting treatment under Dr Sushila Kataria, senior director of the Internal Medicine Department at Medanta, adding that the minister is suffering from a lung infection.
Vij was admitted to Medanta in the evening from the Haryana government's Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS) in Rohtak where he was admitted on Saturday and had received convalescent plasma therapy. The institute had stated that Vij had moderate Covid-19 with bilateral viral pneumonia. After his condition was not improving Vij’s family insisted to shift him to a private hospital in Gurugram.
Earlier, he was being treated at the Civil Hospital in Ambala district.
Last month, Vij had volunteered to be a part of Covaxin’s Phase 3 trials. He was administered with a jab of the two-dose trial of indigenous Covaxin developed by Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech.
Vij was given the dose on November 20 at the Civil Hospital in Ambala Cantonment and the news of his testing Covid positive came on December 5 just days after receiving the vaccine shot. This triggered a question mark on the vaccine's efficacy among the public.
Bharat Biotech, however, contended that clinical trials of the vaccine are based on a two-dose schedule, given 28 days apart. "The vaccine efficacy will be determined two weeks after the second dose," it had said. The statement from the company said that Covaxin has been composed in a way that volunteers get protection in two weeks after receiving the second dose.
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The Union Health Ministry too came forward to clarify that Covaxin is a two-dose vaccine and that Vij was given only the first dose a fortnight before he tested positive.
"The antibodies against the infection build up in a human being only after a specific number of days pass after the second dose of the vaccine is taken. This is a two-dose vaccine. The minister in question has taken only one dose of the vaccine," the ministry had said in a statement.