Hyderabad: It has been clarified that the delay in the availability of vaccines is due to the rising demand for Covid19 vaccines in India, especially with the surge in Coronavirus cases. Earlier, the participating economies which were informed that the doses from the AstraZeneca manufacturing network would be provided by March will now be able to receive them only in April.
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COVAX has already been provided with 28 million doses of the Covishield vaccine while an additional 40 million doses are to be made available by March, followed by 50 million doses in April. On the other hand, it is known that the Serum Institute of India has pledged to prioritise the COVAX multilateral solution for impartial distribution.
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Also, the World Health organisation has laid out an action plan to ensure the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine is distributed in a fair manner so that there would not be a situation wherein the vaccine would be severely restricted in scope.
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For vaccine manufacturers do need time and scale in order to optimise their production of the vaccines. In this situation, it may be noted that AstraZeneca uses a novel supply chain with sites located across multiple continents and efforts are on to provide the vaccine throughout 82 nations with the help of COVAX in the coming weeks.
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COVAX aims to supply initial doses of vaccines to all participating economies in the first half of 2021, prior to ramping up significantly in the second half of the year. Already, COVAX has distributed the vaccines to over 50 nations and economies to date.
