India said that the COVID-19 vaccine Corbevax can be administered as a booster dose in people who have taken the country's other two main shots, Covaxin and Covishield, from Friday.
Biological E's Corbevax will be available to over 18s as precautionary booster six months after a second dose, the health ministry said in an August 8 letter to state authorities and shared with reporters on Wednesday.
Covishield is produced for the Indian market by the Serum Institute of India under licence from AstraZeneca, while Bharat Biotech makes Covaxin.
India has so far administered more than 2 billion COVID vaccine shots, including 113 million boosters, all of which have so far been of the same vaccine as the recipient's first two doses.
The government says about 89 per cent of people above the age of 12 have had two doses.
The country of nearly 1.4 billion people has documented more than 44 million coronavirus infections and 526,826 related deaths.
The actual numbers are believed to be many times higher.
GlaxoSmithKline sued Pfizer and BioNTech in Delaware federal court on Thursday, accusing them of infringing GSK patents related to messenger RNA (mRNA) technology in the companies' blockbuster COVID-19 vaccines.
Israel's military is poised to evacuate Palestinian civilians from Rafah and assault Hamas hold-outs in the southern Gaza Strip city, a senior Israeli defence official said, despite international warnings of a humanitarian catastrophe.
Relentless rains, hail and winds of near hurricane intensity battered southern China, forcing the evacuation of an entire town of more than 1,700 people in the province of Guangdong, media said on Thursday.
Marine wildlife experts were frantically trying to rescue some 140 pilot whales stranded on Thursday in the shallow waters of an estuary in the southwest of the state of Western Australia.
A grand jury has charged 18 people with allegedly participating in an Arizona fake elector scheme to re-elect then-US President Donald Trump in 2020, the state's attorney general said on Wednesday.
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