With three global vaccine candidates Pfizer, Moderna and Oxford releasing encouraging trial results in the past few weeks, the expectation in countries like the US, the UK and Germany is that emergency use authorisation of these vaccines may pave the way for their use in limited doses before the end of this year.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to visit the Pune-based Serum Institute of India, the world’s biggest vaccine manufacture which has partnered with AstraZeneca and Oxford University for making their COVID-19 vaccine, to take stock of its progress on Saturday.
Adar Poonawalla, the chief executive of Serum, has gone on record to say that he expects his company would have manufactured 100 million doses of the Oxford vaccine by January.
Yet, given India’s 1.3 billion-strong population, the country will need to scale up vaccine production and potentially need more sources in order to cover most of its population in 2021.
Thus, a multi-pronged strategy involving several stakeholders, and one that does not depend on a single magic bullet, is the need of the hour.
It is to this end that the Centre on Wednesday launched ‘Mission COVID Suraksha’ to facilitate the development process of 5-6 COVID-19 vaccine candidates.
Beyond R&D, the mission aims to help the candidates in the procurement of licences and eventually introduce them to the market.
The government hopes that the mission will ensure a supply of sufficient doses of these jabs, once they are approved.
PM Modi recently interacted with state chief ministers via video conferencing to take stock of the states’ preparedness for what is going to be an extremely complex technical, scientific and logistical operation to vaccinate hundreds of millions of Indians.
About the mission
Mission COVID Suraksha comes with a grant of Rs 900 crore, given to the Department of Biotechnology, and seeks to provide end-to-end passages for the vaccines from the preclinical to the manufacturing stage.
The package had been announced by the central government in the third stimulus.
The Department of Biotechnology is supporting the development of at least 10 vaccine candidates. Of these five, including Russia’s Sputnik-V, are in the human trial stage.
The project’s aim is to establish clinical trial sites and bolster existing laboratories, production facilities and various test facilities in support of COVID vaccine development.
