Juhi Rai, chargé d'affaires ai, Embassy of India in Mexico

India is known worldwide for its ancient culture and for being the second most populous country in the world, with a population of 1.3 billion inhabitants. However, it is also a modern country with great contributions to world scientific knowledge. Abhijit Banerjee, Kailash Satyarthi, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Amartya Sen, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Mother Teresa, Hargobind Khorana, CV Raman and Rabindranath Tagore are the nine Indian nationals to be awarded Nobel prizes. The disciplines for which they have been awarded range from peace to sciences such as medicine, chemistry and physics.

India has shown tremendous progress in terms of infrastructure development, creation of a technological base and a wide range of products. In the pharmaceutical sector, it is known as the "pharmacy of the world" because it is the largest supplier of generic drugs and vaccines worldwide. India supplies generic medicines to more than 200 countries; Eight of the top twenty generic companies in the world are Indian. In addition, it provides the necessary medicines for the great missions of organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, UNICEF and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among many others.

The culmination of scientific development in the pharmaceutical sector has been achieved with the development of the vaccine against Covid-19, Covaxin, manufactured by the Bharat Biotech laboratory -a company based in Hyderabad- in collaboration with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). ) and the National Institute of Virology (NIV). The quality and efficacy of the Covaxin vaccine was endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO) at the beginning of November and by the Mexican government, through the approval for emergency use by the Federal Commission for the Protection against Risks Health (Cofepris) last March.

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The Covaxin vaccine is 78 percent effective against symptomatic disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and 93.4 percent effective against severe cases. Its administration requires two doses 28 days apart. Among the great advantages of this vaccine are: that it does not need to be stored at sub-zero temperatures, it does not require reconstitution and it has a ready-to-use liquid presentation in multidose vials. These qualities facilitate logistics and transportation in countries with complex orography and large territorial extensions, as is the case of India and Mexico.

Thanks to the Covaxin vaccine, India has been able to make leaps and bounds in the world's largest vaccination campaign against Covid-19. This vaccine has been a central element so that, to date, the first dose has been administered to 80 percent of the eligible population. With this, it has been possible to apply more than one billion doses in the country.

Mexico and India have a history of great cooperation, which was reinforced in this pandemic, as Mexico was the first country in Latin America to receive 870,000 doses of vaccines from the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, from the Serum Institute of India. Covaxin will be, without a doubt, another great chapter of cooperation between our wonderful countries.