BALLABGARH, India – At the end of November, an urgent email appears in the inbox of Hindustan Syringes & Medical Devices, one of the world’s largest syringe manufacturers.
It was from UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children, and was desperately looking for syringes. Not just anyone would do that. These syringes should be smaller than usual. They had to break when used a second time, to prevent diseases from spreading by accidentally recycling.
Most importantly, UNICEF needed them in large quantities. Now.
“I thought ‘No problem,'” said Rajiv Nath, managing director of the company, who sank millions of dollars to prepare his spray mills for the vaccination attack. “We could possibly deliver it faster than anyone else.”
While countries are struggling to secure enough vaccine doses to end the Covid-19 outbreak, a second scramble for injections is beginning. Vaccinations are not as useful if health workers do not have a way to inject them into humans.
“Many countries have been trampled on,” said Ingrid Katz, co-director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. “It seems like a fundamental irony that countries around the world were not quite willing to get these types of syringes.”
The world needs between eight and ten billion syringes for Covid-19 vaccinations, experts say. In previous years, only 5 to 10 percent of the estimated 16 billion syringes worldwide were intended for vaccination and vaccination, said Prashant Yadav, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a think tank in Washington, and a health expert. . care supply chains.
Richer countries such as the United States, Britain, France and Germany have pumped billions of dollars in taxpayers’ money to develop the vaccines, but little public investment has gone into expanding syringe production, he said. Yadav said.
“I’m not only concerned about the overall capacity of syringe manufacturing, but also for the specific types of syringes, and whether syringes are already in places where they are needed.”
Not all the syringes in the world are suitable for the job.
To maximize the production of a vial of Pfizer vaccine, a syringe should have an exact dose of 0.3 milliliters. The syringes should also have a low dead space – the infinite distance between the plunger and the needle after the dose has been fully injected – to minimize waste.
The industry has increased to meet the demand. Becton Dickinson, who is based in New Jersey and is a major manufacturer of syringes, said he will spend $ 1.2 billion over four years to partially expand the capacity to deal with pandemics.
According to Fitch Solutions, a research firm, the United States is the largest spray supplier in the world. The United States and China are neck and neck in exports, with combined annual shipments worth $ 1.7 billion. Although India is a small player worldwide, with only $ 32 million exports in 2019, see Mr. Nath of Hindustan Syringes a great opportunity.
Each of its syringes sells for only three cents, but its total investment is substantial. He invested nearly $ 15 million to manufacture specialist syringes, equivalent to about one-sixth of his annual sales, before the orders were in sight. In May, he ordered new molds from suppliers in Italy, Germany and Japan to make a variety of barrels and splashes for his syringes.
Mr. Nath added 500 workers to its production lines, distributing more than 5,900 syringes per minute at factories located in a dusty industrial district outside New Delhi. If the Sundays and public holidays are off, the company will pay out almost 2.5 billion a year, although they plan to increase three billion by July.
Hindustan Syringes has a long history of providing UNICEF vaccination programs in some of the poorest countries, where reuse of syringes is common and one of the major sources of deadly infections, including HIV and hepatitis.
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In late December, when the World Health Organization cleared Pfizer’s emergency vaccine, Robert Matthews, a UNICEF contract manager in Copenhagen, and his team had to find a manufacturer that could produce millions of syringes.
“We went,” Oh, honey! “,” Mr Matthews said as they searched for a syringe that met the WHO’s specifications and was compact for dispatch, Hindustan Syringes’
The company will soon transport 3.2 million of the syringes, UNICEF said, provided they remove another quality control.
Mr. Nath has sold 50 million syringes to the Japanese government, and more than 400 million to India for his Covid-19 vaccination, one of the largest in the world. More are in line, including UNICEF, for which he offered to produce about 240 million more, and Brazil, he said.
Within the company’s plant no. 6 humming machines covered with yellow paint while spraying out plastic barrels and plunger. Other machines, from Bergamo, Italy, make each component together, including needles, which are monitored by sensors and cameras. Workers in blue protective suits inspect pickups full of syringes before unloading them into crates that transport them by hand to a packing area next door.
To increase efficiency, trust Mr. Nath on a spray design from Marc Koska, a British inventor of safety injections, and the ability to manufacture all the components in-house. Hindustan Sprayers make its needles from stainless steel strips imported from Japan. The strips are curled into cylinders and welded to the seam, then stretched and cut into fine capillary tubes, which glue machines onto plastic hubs. To make the jabs less painful, they are dipped in a silicone solution.
The spraying company is a ‘leech’, said Mr. Nath said, where advance costs are astronomical and profitable. If demand for his syringes drops by half in the next few years, he will lose almost all of the $ 15 million he has invested.
This is clearly a frugal operation. The blue carpet in the office of mr. Nath looks just as old as his desk or the glass chandelier on the stairs, which the father installed in 1984 before handing the company over to Mr. Handed over to Nath and his family.
A family business is exactly how he likes it. No shareholders, no interference, no worries. In 1995, when Mr. Nath needed money to increase production and buy many new machines, he sought private capital for the first time. If that were the case today, he said, he would not be able to follow the gut and manufacture his syringes on this enormous scale.
“You sleep well,” said Mr. Nath said. “It’s better to be a big fish in a pond.”