CHALLENGE 2021

India has enhanced its global standing by supplying COVID-19 vaccines to rich and poor countries alike. It must now scale up its manufacturing by roping in public sector units to cement its position in the changing geopolitics

- VIBHA VARSHNEY

IT'S DIFFICULT to fathom how in this protracted war against the pandemic, the virus, sars-cov-2, has managed every time to gain the upper hand over humanity, its ingenuity and its scientific breakthroughs. In the beginning, the world scrambled to decode the novel virus and its infection strategies and to churn out enough personal protection equipment, hand sanitisers, ventilators and other medical supplies. Then it was the race to develop worthy vaccines in record time. Despite humanity successfully crossing these hurdles, the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues to rage and the world now stares at yet another challenge of vaccinating everyone well in time.

Consider these numbers. Till April 8, only 711 million jabs had been administered across the world, as per the Johns Hopkins University, US. This has ensured complete inoculation of a little more than 2 per cent of the world’s adult population. According to data analytics company Airfinity, the world will manufacture 9.5 billion doses by the end of 2021. It, however, needs over 14 billion doses as soon as possible to vaccinate its entire adult population. This is almost three times the number of vaccines the world was producing in the pre-pandemic period for other diseases, as per vaccine alliance GAVI.

A worried pharmaceutical industry met on March 8 and 9 at the Global COVID-19 Vaccine Supply Chain and Manufacturing Summit in London, UK, to iron out production glitches and distribution snags in the vaccination drive. “We must urgently work together to prevent shortages from slowing the delivery of the vaccines we need in order to end the pandemic,” said Richard Hatchett, chief executive of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a non-governmental organisation based in Oslo, Norway, at the summit.