New Delhi: India is the largest buyer of Covid-19 vaccines in the world with 1.6 billion doses, news agency PTI reported quoting a global analysis. It further said that these vaccine doses would cover 800 million Indians, or 60 per cent of the total population, enough to develop “herd immunity”.
India has purchased 500 million doses of the Oxford University-AstraZeneca vaccine candidate, one billion from the US company Novavax and 100 million doses of the Sputnik V candidate from Russia’s Gamaleya Research Institute, according to the US-based Duke University Global Health Innovation Center.
According to the analysis, PTI reported, India is the top Covid-19 vaccine buyer followed by the European Union which has confirmed 1.58 billion doses and the US, the worst affected country so far, that has managed to purchase just over a billion doses.
“Countries with manufacturing capacity, such as India and Brazil, have been successful in negotiating large advance market commitments with leading vaccine candidates as part of the manufacturing agreements,” the Duke researchers noted in their analysis.
“The data is based on what is in the public domain and after speaking to government officials, especially in India,” PTI quoted noted virologist Shahid Jameel as saying. In November, Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said 400-500 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were estimated to be made available for 250 to 300 million (25 crore to 30 crore) people in India by July-August 2021.
Jameel told PTI that all the vaccines “pre-booked” by India are manufactured by Indian companies – Oxford-AstraZeneca and Novavax by Serum Institute of India (SII) in Pune and Sputnik V by Dr Reddy’s Lab in Hyderabad.
India’s domestic vaccine candidate by Bharat Biotech also entered Phase 3 clinical trials this week.
“Bharat Biotech and Zydus-Cadila would also add about 400 million doses annually. In brief, the numbers appear reasonable over 2021 and 2022,” said Jameel, director of the Trivedi School of Biosciences, Ashoka University. “We can expect the first 250 million to be vaccinated in 2021; the remaining in the following years. The problem will not be vaccine doses, but the ability to deliver them,” he explained.
He noted that 1.6 billion doses would cover 800 million people or 60 per cent of India’s population. This, the virologist said, should be enough to develop herd immunity, a form of indirect protection from infectious disease that occurs when sufficient percentage of a population has become immune to an infection.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had earlier interacted with team of developers and visited three cities on Saturday to conduct an extensive review of the vaccine development and manufacturing process, going to the Zydus Biotech Park in Ahmedabad, the Bharat Biotech in Hyderabad and the Serum Institute of India in Pune.
WITH AGENCY INPUTS