The CEO of the Indian pharmaceutical giant, which dozens of countries are counting on to supply them with Covid-19 vaccines, said on Sunday that their deliveries might be delayed because they were ‘targeted’. to meet domestic needs for export orders.
“Dear countries and governments,” wrote Adar Poonawalla, CEO of the Serum Institute of India. a tweet in which he warned of delays. “I humbly ask you to please be patient,” he wrote, adding that his company had been instructed to “prioritize the great needs of India and at the same time balance the needs of the rest of the world. We try our best. ”
He did not say who issued the directive, and the Serum Institute did not immediately return requests for comment.
India produces three-fifths of the world’s supply of all kinds of vaccinations, and the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has launched one of the world’s largest and most ambitious vaccination campaigns, aiming to vaccinate India’s 1.3 billion people. .
Although the country already runs a large vaccination program and administers about 390 million shots against ailments such as measles and tuberculosis in an average year, India is struggling to get Covid vaccinations for the population. Less than 1 percent of Indians have been vaccinated since mid-January. The pandemic has so far caused at least 10.9 million known coronavirus infections in India, more than in any other country except the United States.
The country’s regulators have approved two vaccines: one developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University and manufactured by the Serum Institute, and another – still in trials – developed by the National Institute of Virology with Bharat Biotech, a local pharmaceutical company. which will make the doses.
The Serum Institute will also make doses of a vaccine developed by Novovax once it has been approved.
In addition to providing India and other customers, the company is expected to distribute hundreds of millions of doses of AstraZeneca vaccine and more than one billion Novovax vaccines through the global vaccination initiative Covax, which aims to ensure that 92 low- and middle-income countries receive vaccines at the same time as the world’s 98 richer countries. Covax did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the warning from Mr. Poonawalla that foreign countries should not wait for vaccinations.
Many developing countries want the AstraZeneca vaccine because it is much cheaper and much easier to store and transport than other Covid vaccines currently in use. It also makes it suitable for India’s extensive vaccination campaign, which should stretch from the high Himalayan mountains to the dense jungles of southern India.
The Indian government has increasingly used the country’s vaccine production capacity as a currency for its international diplomacy, in competition with China, which has made the extinction of shots a central plan of its foreign relations. Last week, for example, India promised to donate 200,000 vaccine doses to United Nations peacekeepers around the world.