 "vaccination")
Indian vaccine makers feel the global community can tap India’s massive jab production capacities created during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The world produced 11 billion doses of the Sars-CoV-2 vaccine last year. This is almost threefold higher than the total vaccine production capacity globally for all jabs put together, which was below 4 billion doses a year. Is this leading to vaccine oversupply of a particular kind?
While oversupply is true for some countries, said Mahima Datla, managing director (MD) of Corbevax vaccine maker Biological E, it is not true for African countries.
“From the business side, one can say if companies were only building capacities for Sars-CoV-2 and did not have a way or a plan to redeploy them for making other vaccines in their pipeline that could have been an issue. It is best to see these as investments in certain technology platforms which can be used to make routine vaccines and also make vaccines for future pandemics,” she said at BioAsia 2022.
Bharat Biotech MD Krishna Ella said India now has four BSL-4 containment facilities, equal to that of the UK. These facilities are spread across Bengaluru and Pune. BSL or bio-safety level refers to biological safety levels. Laboratories are categorised into four levels ranging from BSL-1 to BSL-4, depending on their abilities to handle dangerous and potentially lethal pathogens. “We have eight BSL-3 facilities — Bhubaneshwar, Pune, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad. So, any international community can depend on India to use these containment facilities as hubs. These could be partnerships. Many countries do not have BSL-3 containment facilities. This is going to be important in the future,” Ella said, hinting at possibilities of international collaborations.
Soumya Swaminathan, chief scientist at WHO, seemed to agree on global collaborations in vaccine manufacturing. “For the future, we need a distributing manufacturing network for which we have the mRNA technology transfer hub in South Africa. We are now initiating various spokes. Many companies are working on second-generation mRNA technology. No region must be dependent on other countries for imports of vaccines or other health products.
Indian firms have built huge capacities to make Covid-19 vaccines.
Biological E can make 1 billion doses of Corbevax a year. It is already supplying 300 million doses to the Indian government. The company is contract-manufacturing around 500-600 million doses of the vaccine for J&Johnson. It is expected to make 1 billion doses of Covid vaccines by the end of 2022 for the Indo-Pacific region with support from Quad. While the exact details have not been revealed, the J&J vaccine is likely to be made in India under the Quad Vaccine Partnership, an alliance between India, US, Japan, and Australia.
It has tied up with Canadian firm Providence Therapeutics to make its mRNA technology based vaccine here. Providence will provide the necessary technology transfer to make the vaccine in India, with a minimum production capacity of 600 million doses in 2022 and a target capacity of 1 billion doses. Similarly, Ella’s firm is building capacities to make 1 billion annual doses of Covaxin, apart from 1 billion annual doses of their upcoming nasal vaccine.
Serum Institute of India in Pune is making 250 million monthly doses (3 billlion annual doses) of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine Covishield, and has the Novavax vaccine to its repertoire. The higher production of vaccines has now eased the supply shortages that WHO-led vaccine initiative Covax was facing earlier.
Swaminathan said: “We are over the phase of supply shortage that we saw for most parts of 2021. Now, we have enough stability on supplies that can satisfy demands.”
Swaminathan explained that the challenge now lies elsewhere. “The challenge now is that many countries have not been able to mount the kind of successful vaccination programmes that India has been able to. Many countries need a lot of support on the ground in terms of technology, workforce, funding, and other logistical backing. Covax is going to help countries to scale up production to this high target of vaccinating 70 per cent of population.”
Vaccine makers feel supply security is a good idea for global jab equity. “Also, so far, we have only looked at adult immunisation, but there is a lot to be done in children’s vaccination. It’s time to consider whether to expand the children’s vaccination and how India as a nation could contribute to ensure more vaccine equity to the world,” Datla said.
