The government is exploring the possibility of producing Bharat Biotech’s Covid vaccine Covaxin abroad through a technology transfer between commercial entities amid shortage of supply, reports said quoting government officials.
“There is a need to meet the demand for Covid-19 vaccines in view of the new mutation of the virus to more infectious nature. We have decided to offer Covaxin to any interested foreign countries. The production would be done through technology transfer between commercial entities,” Hindustan Times quoted officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The report added that terms and conditions for the same would have to be finalised by Bharat Biotech.
It added that the same will be done for any Indian vaccine in the future. The matter has been communicated to the missions abroad to seek interested countries for production.
The move comes as India is recording huge sure in infections and resultant deaths, and looking to boost domestic production of the vaccines. The government last week decided to offer an advance of over Rs 4,500 crore to Serum Institute of India and Bharat Biotech.
Covaxin has been developed by Indian biotechnology company Bharat Biotech and clinical research body Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). It has shown a 78 per cent efficacy in the second interim analysis and 100 per cent against ‘severe Covid-19 disease’.
Bharat Biotech on April 20 announced it will scale up of manufacturing capacity to produce 700 million doses of Covaxin annually.
Recently, America’s top pandemic expert Dr Anthony Fauci said that Covaxin has been found to neutralise the 617 variants of the deadly virus.
“This is something where we’re still gaining data on a daily basis. But the most recent data, was looking at convalescent Sera of COVID-19 cases and people who received the vaccine used in India, the Covaxin. It was found to neutralise the 617 variants,” the 80-year-old physician-scientist and immunologist said. “So, despite the real difficulty that we’re seeing in India, vaccination could be a very, very important antidote against this,” Fauci, the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief medical advisor to the president, added.
Bharat Biotech has fixed the price of its COVID-19 vaccine, Covaxin, at Rs 600 per dose for state governments and at Rs 1,200 per dose for private hospitals, the vaccine maker announced on Saturday.
In a statement issued on April 20, Bharat Biotech had said it was exploring manufacturing partnerships with partners in other countries, who have prior expertise with commercial scale manufacture of inactivated viral vaccines under biosafety containment.
“Manufacturing scale up has been carried out in a stepwise manner across multiple facilities at Hyderabad, and Bangalore. Inactivated vaccines, while highly safe, are extremely complex and expensive to manufacture, resulting in lower yields when compared to live virus vaccines,” it added in the statement.
Covaxin has received Emergency Use Authorisation in several countries across the globe with another 60 in process.
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