Reducing dose gap may help liquidate Covishield vaccine stocks faster

The Centre’s recent move to reduce the gap between two Covishield doses to 8-16 weeks from the earlier gap of 12-16 weeks may help liquidate vaccine stocks faster.

Covishield maker Serum Institute of India (SII) is sitting on 200-250 million doses of the vaccine at its Pune facility. The administration of Covishield at a reduced gap of 8 weeks has not started yet.

However, this would create a faster turnaround of stocks lying with the government and private hospitals, thereby leading to a liquidation of the inve­ntory lying with the company.

A source close to the developments told Business Standard that SII has 200-250 million finished doses of Covishield at Pune.

SII did not wish to comment on the monthly dispatches from the Pune plant, but confirmed that the bulk of the stocks were being exported as local demand is low.

Around December, SII had started slowing production of Covishield in Pune after it had piled up a stock of around 

500 million doses – half of which were in bulk dose form and the remaining were finished doses. Vaccines in bulk dose form can be converted into finished formulation in about a month’s time.

The firm has liquidated almost half of its inventory. Liquidating stocks is critical for SII as it can store around 600-700 million doses at its site.

According to the Union Health Ministry, as of March 22, states had around 169.7 million vaccine doses lying with them.

Biological E supplied around 50 million doses of Corbevax to the Centre recently, and is in the process of supplying more. If one considers the 50 million Corbevax doses, then the stockpile of Covishield and Covaxin lying with the state and Centre would be roughly around 119 million doses.

So far, Covishield has accounted for 83 per cent of the total 1.8 billion vaccine doses administered in India.

At that rate, one can estimate that around 90-99 million doses of the vaccine stock with the Centre and state governments could be of Covishield. This figure could not be verified with the Centre.

Hospital sources say that several doses of Covishield are set to expire by the end of this month. “Hundreds of thousands of doses of the vaccine lying with private sector institutions are nearing expiry this month and we do not know whether these would be taken back. The hospital industry body will hold a meeting on this soon to decide future course of action,” said the administrator of a Mumbai-based hospital.