Last checked at 
(Updates with details from Serum CEO)
By Devjyot Ghoshal and Sumit Khanna
KOLKATA/AHMEDABAD, India, Dec 28 (Reuters) - The Serum
Institute of India, the local maker of the Oxford/AstraZeneca
coronavirus vaccine, said on Monday it expected the
British and Indian governments to approve shots for emergency
use within a few days.
"You will be hearing some good news from the UK very soon,"
Serum's Chief Executive Adar Poonawalla told reporters, adding
that approval from the Indian regulator would likely follow
shortly.
"By January, we should have the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine
licensed."
The company has already made 40 million to 50 million doses
of the vaccine and will be able to ramp up capacity to around
100 million a month by March when a new facility comes online,
Poonawalla said.
India wants to deliver 600 million coronavirus shots in the
next six to eight months starting in January. The country's drug
regulator is also considering similar approvals for the Pfizer
/BioNTech vaccine and another developed by
India's Bharat Biotech.
VACCINATION DRILLS
Some Indian states on Monday began a trial run of COVID-19
vaccine delivery systems, with health authorities checking
everything from their technology platforms to the storage
infrastructure that will be required to inoculate millions.
"The exercise is basically a mock drill for our healthcare
workers on how to run the whole vaccination process and system,"
Jaiprakash Shivahare, the commissioner for health in the western
state of Gujarat, told Reuters.
State health officials had set up 19 vaccination centres,
each with 25 dummy beneficiaries played by health workers, who
would help test out the entire inoculation sequence, including
online monitoring systems, Shivahare said.
"The cold chain infrastructure for distribution of the
vaccine is also being tested as a part of the dry run," he said.
India has the second-highest number of confirmed coronavirus
cases in the world after the United States, and it has recorded
147,901 deaths so far.
On Monday, the federal health ministry reported a daily
increase of a little over 20,000 infections, taking the
country's total so far to 10.2 million cases.
(Additional Reporting by Zarir Hussain in GUWAHATI, Writing by
Devjyot Ghoshal; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
