India has said it will ship to Bhutan, Maldives, Bangladesh and more.
LONDON – India has started exporting Covid-19 vaccines to neighboring countries, with the first groups being sent to Bhutan, Maldives, Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar and Seychelles on Wednesday, the foreign ministry said.
“The first consignment is taking off for Bhutan!” was the first of a flurry of tweets from Foreign Ministry spokesman Anurag Srivastava, while posting photos of groups departing and arriving at various destinations, ‘Indian vaccines reach Maldives, reflect our special friendship.’
“India is very honored to be a partner that has long been trusted in the healthcare needs of the world community,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted on Tuesday when announcing that the first shipments will be shipped today.
India is sending these vaccine groups ‘under aid’, according to a press release from the Foreign Ministry, as the government has ‘received several requests to deliver vaccines produced by India to surrounding and important partner countries.’
Premier Modi’s foreign policy focus, called ‘First Neighborhood First’, was often on improving ties with Indian immediate neighbors, which would explain the destination of these first vaccines.
Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s foreign minister, said his country was “fulfilling its commitment to give vaccines to humanity … will supply the pharmacy of the world to overcome the COVID challenge”, did he tweet
. India is home to the largest vaccine producer in the world by volume, the Serum Institute of India (SII), based in Pune.
The Serum Institute manufactures the vaccine developed by Oxford University and Astra Zeneca under the local brand name COVISHIELD and will distribute it to India, its neighbors and other low- and middle-income countries.
SII currently produces about 60 million doses of COVISHIELD per month and aims to increase it to 100 million doses by March. SII has also agreed to provide COVAX, the WHO-backed alliance, to ensure equitable access to vaccines, with 200 million doses distributed by early 2021.
But the Serum Institute is not the only major vaccine producer in India. Bharat Biotech’s COVAXIN vaccine was also approved by the Indian government in early January.
At the time, this move was criticized by several experts who accused the government of making the decision because the data from the phase 3 trials of the vaccine had not yet been published.
Full data on the efficacy of the vaccine are still awaited and COVAXIN is not part of this initial export, but is also being rolled out internally with COVISHIELD.
India launched the world’s largest vaccination program last Saturday and wants to reach 1.3 billion people as quickly as possible.
India’s announcement on vaccine exports comes at a time when the international community is warning that many lower – income countries are lagging behind in global vaccination.
“The world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, said on Monday at the opening of the WTO’s annual executive council meeting. “The price for this failure will be paid with lives and subsistence in the poorest countries in the world.”
India’s announcement was immediately approved by Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and expert infectious diseases adviser to the British government.
‘This is a very important and much appreciated move by India to provide vaccines worldwide in a fair way. “A health science, science and economics field,” he tweeted.
Today’s move makes India the first to supply vaccines to these countries in South Asia, placing it ahead of China and COVAX.
It is important that it does not send vaccines to the immediate neighbor Pakistan, with which bilateral trade has broken down, due to political differences of opinion over the disputed territories of Jammu and Kashmir.