Pakistan is capable of developing a vaccine for the novel coronavirus and it is working on it, says Dr Ghulam Muhammad Ali, director general of the National Agricultural Research Centre (NARC).

Ali said that Pakistan had the biosafety level-2 (BSL-2) capacity and it could achieve the BSL-3 capacity if the government provides funds for this purpose. He said the government was presented projects many times in the last four years, but to no avail. Had the past governments paid attention to the issue, he said, Pakistan would have made the vaccine to fight coronavirus by now.

Ali said that coronavirus was not new; it had already been there, but its structure and shape had changed. He said that a vaccine was being developed at the NARC lab to treat coronavirus in chickens. He said that nebulisation/steam was the immediate treatment for the coronavirus disease. He said that coronavirus molecules could be destroyed by steam. He said the possibility that the latest type of coronavirus was developed in a lab could not be ruled out. He said that type of a virus could be changed in the lab. He said it should be investigated whether coronavirus was developed in a laboratory or not.