New Delhi: A study conducted by global medical journal BMJ suggests that nearly a quarter of the world's population may not have access to a COVID-19 vaccine until 2022.
In an exclusive interview to ETV Bharat, Director General of Maulana Azad Medical College Dr Suneela Garg on Thursday said that India is in a secure position as far as ensuring Covid19 vaccine availability to its citizens is concerned.
Garg, who is also the Head of the Community Medicine, said developing countries have got Pfizer vaccine and a few of them have got access to the Chinese vaccine.
"At the same time, many of India's Covid19 vaccine candidates are in advance stage," said Dr Garg.
Serum Institute of India (SII's) Covishield is likely to get emergency use authorisation very soon as their vaccine has already passed trials in abroad.
Bharat Biotech's COVAXIN is also in stage 3. It's phase 1 and 2 showed a positive result.
"Results of Bharat Biotech's vaccine candidate shows food immunogenicity and this vaccine is supported by ICMR," said Dr Garg.
"We also have vaccine candidate from Zydas Cadila. In fact, our country is also fulfilling the need of other countries as far as immunisation is concerned," added Dr Garg.
She said that Covid19 vaccine is not going to be a problem for India. "People in many cities have achieved hard immunity. People in cities like Mumbai and even Delhi have got hard immunity. Above all India is managing the pandemic very well," said Dr Garg.
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In research and development, 48 candidates vaccines are currently undergoing clinical testing, and at least another 164 candidates are at preclinical stages.
"Even with the unprecedented levels of public financing and the accelerated pace of bringing such vaccines to market, final demand will vastly outstrip available supply during this scale-up period. Intense interest has focused on which countries and when populations will have access to safe and effective vaccine candidates emerging from research and development," BMJ said in its study.
The BMJ said that of the 48 covid-19 vaccine candidate undergoing clinical evaluation, 13 manufacturers have entered into premarket purchase commitments for at least 7.48 billion doses or 3.76 billion courses. High-income countries including the European Union block have reserved 51% of these doses, or around 3.85 billion doses, though they comprise only 13.7 per cent of the world's population.
Of the 13 manufacturers, only 6 have sold to low and middle-income countries. Of the doses going to low and middle-income countries the majority have been provided by AstraZeneca/ Oxford University (2.03 billion doses), Novavax (1.1 billion doses), the Russian firm, Gamaleya Research Institute (349 million doses) and the Chinese firms, SinoVac and CanSino (135 million doses).
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The Covid19 situation varies markedly across these countries. For example, as of November 2020, the US had reserved 800 million doses but accounted for a fifth of all Covid19 cases globally.
By contrast, Japan, Australia and Canada had reserved more than a billion (1.03 billion) doses, though these three countries combined did not account for even 1 per cent of all current Covid19 cases.
Interestingly, US, UK, European Union, Canada have placed orders with at least six different manufacturers, Japan with at least four and Brazil with at least three manufacturers.
