World’s largest vaccine producer urges countries to be patient

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Serum Institute of India (STI), the world’s largest vaccine producer, has urged countries waiting for covid-19 immunizers to be “patient” after being told to prioritize India’s “enormous needs.”

The STI “has been directed to prioritize India’s enormous needs and along with that balance, the needs of the rest of the world,” the institute’s representative Adar Poonawalla wrote on Twitter on Sunday, February 21st. He did not clarify where the order came from or if these are new directions.

Responsible for 60 percent of the world’s vaccines before the pandemic, the STI is producing hundreds of millions of doses of the Anglo-Swedish AstraZeneca vaccine, known locally as Covishield, at its facility in Pune, western India, and has shipped millions abroad, including to Brazil.

The Indian manufacturer, which has received orders from several countries, including Canada, also plans to supply 200 million doses under the Covax facility, a World Health Organization initiative to guarantee access to vaccines for the poorest countries.

India began a massive vaccination campaign on January 16th, and has so far immunized some 11 million people, according to the Ministry of Health.

The Indian government had set a goal of vaccinating approximately 300 million people by July in a 1.3 billion-inhabitant nation, but the campaign has suffered major delays, not because of a vaccine shortage, but rather due to a lack of candidates.

According to the Hindustan Times, only 4% of the estimated 191,000 healthcare workers have been administered the second dose of the vaccine one month after the first, the time frame the manufacturer recommends for the second shot, although it is possible to extend it to six weeks.

The distrust of vaccines and the sharp drop in the number of cases in the country may explain the population’s lack of interest, according to experts heard by Time magazine.

The country has dramatically reduced the spread of the disease in recent months, after reaching the highest figure for infections in mid-September 2020, with 97,894 cases in a single day.

In the latest daily balance, India recorded only 14,199 cases, in addition to 83 deaths, according to data from the Indian Ministry of Health, having recorded an average of 13,000 daily cases over the past week.

Nonetheless, the number of cases has increased in Maharashtra over the past two weeks, the hardest hit Indian state by the pandemic, which has seen the number of daily infections double, now averaging more than 5,000 cases.

Yesterday, the Indian state recorded almost 7,000 new infections, almost half of the country’s total. However, less than 36% of people registered to be vaccinated on February 11th in the state capital Nagpur turned up at healthcare centers, according to the Times of India daily newspaper.

India has registered over 11 million novel coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic, remaining second with the most infections, behind the United States, which registered over 28.1 million cases in the last report.

With a total of 156,385 deaths, India is the country in the world with the fourth-most deaths, behind the United States, Brazil, and Mexico, according to US Johns Hopkins University’s independent count.

The covid-19 pandemic has caused at least 2,461,254 deaths worldwide, resulting from more than 111 million infections, according to a report by French AFP news agency.

Source: Agencia Brasil