Ghaziabad: Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan on Saturday said that India`s first vaccine against the novel coronavirus could be available by end of this year. "One of our COVID-19 vaccine candidates is in the third phase of the clinical trial. We are very confident that a vaccine will be developed by end of this year," Dr Harsh Vardhan said while inaugurating an NDRF 10-bedded makeshift hospital in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh. He said: "I am happy to say that in the eighth month of the battle, India has the best recovery rate of 75 per cent. A total of 2.2 million patients have recovered and gone home and another seven lakh are going to be cured very soon."

"We started with only one testing laboratory in Pune but we scaled up our diagnostic capabilities and strengthened our testing capacity. Today, India has 1,500 testing labs for COVID-19 and on Friday we tested over one million samples," the minister added. India on Saturday recorded the highest-ever single day peak of 63,631 recoveries from COVID-19 in the last 24 hours, the recoveries exceed the active cases by more than 15 lakh and the recovery rate stands at 74.69 per cent, said Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

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