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How India landed in Covid vaccine mess - GS Mudur

-The Telegraph

The Centre had last November announced a Rs 900-crore project but none of this money went to either Covishield or Covaxin

India’s shortage of Covid-19 vaccines that precludes immediate inoculation for all adults is rooted in the Narendra Modi government’s lack of funding for key vaccines under development and evaluation, experts have said.

The experts, who have tracked global vaccine efforts, said the Indian government’s lack of investments contrasted with the actions of many countries, including America and Britain, that provided advance funding to vaccine makers and signed purchase pacts with them.

The Centre had last November announced a Rs 900-crore project, coordinated by the Union science ministry’s department of biotechnology, for Covid-19 vaccines.

But none of this money went to either Covishield, the AstraZeneca vaccine produced by the Serum Institute of India at Pune, or Covaxin, the home-grown vaccine made by the Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech. Instead, a part of it was given to candidate vaccines that were at more nascent stages of development.

An epidemiologist who asked not to be named described this as a “botch-up”.

The Serum Institute invested $270 million (Rs 2,012 crore) of its money and $300 million (Rs 2,236 crore) from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to build production capacity for its vaccines, while Bharat Biotech relied almost entirely on its internal resources.

The Centre covered the costs of the Covishield clinical trials by the Serum Institute and supported Bharat Biotech’s efforts through laboratory research and animal studies at the National Institute of Virology in Pune, an arm of the Indian Council of Medical Research.

The department of biotechnology had on April 16 — three months after the launch of India’s vaccination campaign — announced it would provide Rs 65 crore to Bharat Biotech to increase production from the current 10 million to 100 million doses of Covaxin per month by September 2021. It also pledged funds to three public sector units to produce an additional 35 million doses per month by September.

Covid-19 vaccines are currently being offered in India only to people 45 years or older. Health officials have underlined the “finite” supply to argue against suggestions that the campaign be widened to cover younger adults, at least in the areas hit the hardest by the pandemic.

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