NEW DELHI (AP) – India on Wednesday began delivering coronavirus vaccines to its neighbors as the world’s largest vaccine the country makes is a balance between enough doses to vaccinate its own people and help developing countries without the ability to deliver their own shots.
The Indian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the country would send 150,000 shots of the AstraZeneca / Oxford University vaccine, produced locally by the Serum Institute of India, to Bhutan and 100,000 shots to the Maldives.
Vaccines will also be sent to Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar and the Seychelles in the coming weeks, the ministry said without specifying an exact timeline. It added in a statement late Tuesday that regulatory approvals from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Mauritius are still awaited.
Indian Ambassador to Nepal Vinay Mohan Kwatra said on Wednesday that New Delhi would provide 1 million doses to Nepal free of charge, with the first to arrive as early as Thursday.
Anurag Srivastava, spokesperson for the Indian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said the government will ensure that domestic vaccine producers have sufficient supplies to meet India’s domestic needs as it supplies partner countries in the coming months.
India will continue to deliver vaccines around the world. It will be calibrated according to local requirements and international demand and obligations, ”he said.
Indian regulators earlier this month nodded for emergency use of two vaccines: the AstraZeneca vaccine and another by Indian vaccine maker Bharat Biotech. India launched its own massive vaccination process on January 17, aiming to vaccinate 300 million of its nearly 1.4 billion people.
These vaccines sent to neighboring countries are sent as grants and the Indian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the vaccines are not part of COVAX.
While nations are plotting their own plans and not waiting for COVAX, some experts fear that India’s gesture of goodwill could inadvertently undermine the struggling initiative, which has yet to deliver any of the promised 2 billion vaccines to poor countries. Although COVAX has announced new deals to secure vaccines in recent weeks, it has only signed legally binding deals for a fraction of the required shots.
WHO said earlier this week that he hopes that vaccines purchased through another global initiative purchased by the Gates Foundation, GAVI, may be delivered to poor countries later this month or next year. However, the head of the UN’s health agency in Africa estimated that the first COVID-19 vaccines of the initiative would probably only come in March and that a larger rollout would only start in June.
Of the more than 12 billion doses of coronavirus vaccine produced this year, rich countries have already bought about 9 billion, and many have options to buy even more. This means that Serum Institute, which was contracted by AstraZeneca to make a billion doses, is likely to take the most photos that developing countries will use.
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Associated Press journalists Ashok Sharma in New Delhi and Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.
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