- Saturday, April 20, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
ADAR Poonawalla, the chief executive officer of Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s biggest manufacturer of vaccine for coronavirus, has said that political leaders around the globe and more particularly in Africa are stalling on purchasing jabs despite the fact that only a small percentage of their people have been inoculated despite little shortage.
“We’ve got so much vaccine now that we’ve got more than we can vaccinate on a monthly basis in India. The concern is very much that in a month or two shelf-life could be an issue,” Poonawalla told The Times, UK.
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Around 88 per cent of vaccinated Indians have received SII’s Covishield vaccine, the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab which is produced locally.
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Poonawalla said he was surprised to see that the African countries were not making aggressive moves to buy vaccines despite having an average vaccination level of only 11 per cent.
He said his company has received orders of only 20 million doses from all the countries of Africa put together.
“Everywhere I hear the World Health Organization and others talking about vaccine equality but the African nations are refusing to place orders,” he said, adding, “They’re going very slow, claiming that they’re waiting for donations from the US and other reasons. So there’s a bit of a disconnect.”
Poonawalla also said that he was deliberately blaming the leaders in public so that they do something about accelerating the vaccination drive.
“I hope they read it because maybe they’ll get activated and do something about it. It’s a combination of vaccine hesitancy and nations not coming forward and placing orders in the way they claimed they would, particularly the African nations,” the SII CEO said.
Poonawalla also said that the unused stocks of vaccines are at risk of becoming outdated since the demand has slumped due to factors like vaccine hesitancy. Besides, underfunded public health infrastructure in poorer nations is also another challenge to vaccine rollout, Daily Mail reported.
According to a report in The New York Times, African countries like South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi have all asked vaccine manufacturers and donors to delay sending more doses because they are yet to use up the supplies they have.
As per the latest data, only 246 million of the 384 million doses that have been delivered to African nations have been used which leaves almost a third of the stocks waiting in storage.
In India, a number of states have found problems with excess stocks of vaccines. The government of Maharashtra, for instance, said it will slow down on placing fresh orders for vaccines since it has 13 million pending doses of both the domestically produced vaccines – Covishield and Covaxin, The Telegraph, India, reported.
Karnataka, a southern state, is also trying to figure out ways to utilise plentiful stocks and is also meeting representatives of private hospitals to discuss the issue. Several private hospitals in India are finding themselves struggling with large unused stocks and the country’s government has said that it will take back those stocks from them.
On Tuesday (7), Poonawalla said that SII has decided to slash production of its Covishield vaccine by 50 per cent since there are no more orders from the central government.
“Reducing production by at least 50 percent starting next week as we have no further orders from the government,” he said in an exclusive conversation with Shereen Bhan, managing editor, CNBC-TV18.
