NEW DELHI – With the battle against the coronavirus taking a worrying turn, India has decided to drastically cut exports of Covid vaccines, forcing immunization campaigns in many other countries to halt.
The New Delhi government has decided to almost entirely block the export of the 2.4 million doses produced every day by the Serum Institute of India, a private company that is one of the world‘s largest producers of AstraZeneca’s vaccine. India is desperately trying to procure all possible doses. Daily infections are exceeding 50,000, more than double compared to less than two weeks ago. And India’s vaccination campaign is proceeding slowly, with less than 4 percent of the country’s one billion four hundred million people receiving an injection, far behind the pace the United States, Britain and most of European countries.
Until a few weeks ago, India was a major exporter of AstraZeneca’s vaccine and used it to increase its influence in South Asia and around the world. More than seventy countries, from Djibouti to Great Britain, have received a total of over 60 million doses manufactured in India. From mid-January to March, massive shipments of vaccines left the Asian country every few days.
But in the past two weeks, shipments have dropped sharply, according to data from the Indian Foreign Ministry. And Covax, the program set up by donor agencies to purchase vaccines for poorer nations, on Thursday reported that it told the poorer nations that nearly 100 million doses expected in March and April will be delayed due to “increased demand for vaccines against Covid-19 in India ».
The New Delhi authorities have not issued official statements on the situation of vaccine exports and have not responded to requests from the New York Times for this article. But health experts say the explanation is clear: Now that the second wave has arrived in India, the country is holding onto a vaccine that was not developed in India but is being produced in huge quantities on its territory.
The government of the prime minister Narendra Modi, an iron-fisted nationalist, has the power to decide how many doses of the vaccine can be exported and it appears that India is heading in the same direction as the European Union, which is preparing to curb exports.
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Adar Poonawalla, chief executive of the Serum Institute and scion of the billionaire family that runs the company, is in a very uncomfortable position. The Serum Institute has an interest, in order not to compromise its reputation, in fulfilling the commitments it has made with foreign customers and with AstraZeneca, and in respecting the contracts it has signed.
But Poonawalla has so far carefully avoided saying anything negative about Modi or the pressure he is receiving from his country’s government, preferring to urge patience. “The Serum Institute of India has been instructed to prioritize India’s enormous needs while also taking into account the needs of the rest of the world,” Poonawalla tweeted in late February. “We are trying to do our best.”
The Serum Institute, which is headquartered in a huge complex in the city of Pune, had agreed to supply the vaccines to low- and middle-income countries, according to an agreement signed last year with AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical giant that has developed the vaccine together with Oxford scientists.
Production problems at AstraZeneca’s factories in Belgium and the Netherlands have forced wealthier nations such as Canada, Saudi Arabia and Great Britain to also rely on the doses provided by the Serum Institute, making the role even more central. company in the global AstraZeneca vaccine supply chain
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India has so far exported more doses of vaccines than it has administered to its population, unlike the United States, Great Britain and the states of the European Union. With a population greater than that of Africa and hundreds of millions of people living below the poverty line, the South Asian giant relies on domestic vaccine production, unlike countries that have to source them from suppliers of everything. the world. India produces a second vaccine against Covid-19, developed by a national company, Bharat Biotech, but the demand for this drug worldwide is much lower than that for the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Many poorer countries are likely to fail to have broad access to vaccines before 2023 or 2024, and a prolonged halt to exports from India could further extend these time horizons, says Olivier Wouters, professor of health policy at the London School of Economics, who studies the worldwide vaccine supply chain.
With the spread of the new variants, he says, it is in the interest of all countries to work together to immunize the world population. “Many countries all over the world, especially the poorest ones, rely on India,” says Wouters, “Vaccine nationalism hurts us all.”
Nepal, one of the poorest nations in Asia and neighbor of India, had to pause its immunization campaign, which depended almost entirely on doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine manufactured by the Serum Institute. With supplies close to running out, Kathmandu authorities had to stop administering the vaccines on March 17.
Britain is in a similar situation: it received 5 million doses from the Serum Institute a few weeks ago, but it has been waiting for that much for weeks. One of the prime minister’s greatest collaborators Boris Johnson, Eddie Lister, according to official sources, took advantage of a trip to India this week to try and secure the supplies provided. Johnson is expected to go to India next month, and some diplomats in the country have called his trip a high-profile mission to secure millions more doses.
The Serum Institute also plays an important role in the Covax program for poorer nations. Documents from the World Health Organization show that the Indian company was expected to provide 240 million doses by the end of June. But Indian foreign ministry figures and Covax’s statement released Thursday indicate vaccination campaigns around the world are likely to suffer further delays.
On April 1, India will broaden its vaccination criteria and allow anyone over the age of 45 to receive an injection.
“It’s a fluid situation,” says K. Srinath Reddy, a health policy expert at the Public Health Foundation, an Indian non-profit organization. “But at the moment, considering that the supply of vaccines and the Covid situation is dynamic, I think it is more than appropriate for the government of India to pause and say: ‘Let’s keep stocks'”.
New York Times
(Translation by Fabio Galimberti)
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