Zydus to roll out its vaccine in Sept

NEW DELHI: Zydus Cadila, the Ahmedabad-based company whose coronavirus vaccine was granted emergency approval for use in India on Friday, has said that it expects to begin the supply of the shots by mid-to-end September and is aiming to increase production capacity by October.

The Zydus shot is the world’s first Dna-based vaccine against coronavirus disease (Covid-19) to be approved for use within a population. The three-shot vaccine is also the first to be cleared for use in children aged 12 and above and is the sixth addition to India’s arsenal in the fight against the pandemic.

The company plans to scale up production to 10 million doses a month by October after it presses a new manufacturing plant into action, said managing director Dr Sharvil Patel. They did not elaborate on the location or details about the new plant.

The current production capacity at their existing Ahmedabad plant wasn’t immediately known, but officials said they were readying a stockpile of three to five million doses in the next few days.

“We were producing vaccines at a very small scale; now our new plant has been commissioned. We expect for the vaccine supply to start from midseptember or end-september. We expect to reach the target of 1 crore doses in October,” said Dr Patel at a digital press briefing on Saturday.

The latest timeline given by the company means the vaccine maker will miss the deadline of supplying 50 million doses by the end of the year. The central government told the Supreme Court in June that 1.35 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines will be made available in the country between August and December this year. This included 50 million doses of Zydus’s ZYCOV-D shot, and 300 million doses of Biologicale’s jab that is still under trial.

Patel said on Saturday that there will be a delay of 45 days and that the firm will reach the 50-million target by January. He added that the delivery delay is because of a delay in commissioning the company’s new plant as the second wave of Covid-19 infections prevented the travel of experts from other countries. The managing director also said that two to three other manufacturers have expressed interest in