New Hyd facility to help boost Quad nations’ vaccine supply
NEW DELHI: There will soon be a new vaccine manufacturing facility in Hyderabad to support the Quad countries’ plan of delivering one billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines. An agreement to the effect will be signed during the upcoming visit to India by the US development bank’s chief.
US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) chief operating officer David Marchick will travel to South Africa and India during October 18-26 to take forward investment proposals to boost global health and expand Covid-19 vaccine production across the developing world.
Marchick and his delegation will travel to Hyderabad after arriving in India on October 24 to visit Biological E, which has been selected to produce one billion doses of vaccines to be rolled out by the end of 2022 under the vaccine partnership launched by the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad.
The US delegation will “participate in a signing ceremony to open a new facility with substantial capacity for vaccine manufacturing”, according to a statement from the DFC. “This work is in support of the historic commitment set out by President [Joe] Biden and his counterparts in the Quad – Australia, India, Japan, and the United States.”
In South Africa, the DFC delegation will visit Africa Data Centinuing tres, which is developing critical technology infrastructure across Africa, and meet drug makers critical to the Covid-19 response.
The vaccine partnership is on track to produce one billion doses in India to boost global supply, Biden had said at the first in-person Quad leaders’ summit in Washington on September 24.
Aid from the DFC is aimed at boosting vaccine manufacturing capacity in several regions of the world. This support is projected to facilitate capacity expansion to produce nearly two billion Covid-19 vaccine doses by the end of 2022. Additional production will come on line in India later this year due to the Quad vaccine partnership’s financing of increased manufacturing capacity at Biological E, a joint statement issued at the conclusion of the Quad leaders’ summit last month had said. These doses will be exported to countries in the Indo-Pacific and other parts of the world to overcome a conglobal supply gap. The Quad will coordinate with multilateral initiatives such as the WHO-backed COVAX Facility to procure safe and quality-assured vaccines for low and middle-income countries. The Quad has also launched a vaccine experts group that is working to align the plans of India, Australia, Japan and the US to support health security and the Covid-19 response across the Indo-Pacific. This includes coordination of efforts to support the production of vaccines and equitable access. Quad members have pledged to donate more than 1.2 billion vaccine doses globally. They have so far delivered nearly 79 million jabs to countries in the Indo-Pacific. The Quad summit had also welcomed India’s announcement on resuming vaccine exports, which had been halted in March after the country was hit by a devastating second wave of infections. Since vaccine exports resumed recently, India has sent one million doses of Covishield to Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar, and 300,000 doses of Covaxin to Iran.
Japan will help regional partners purchase vaccines through a Covid-19 crisis response emergency support loan of $3.3 billion, and Australia will provide $212 million in grants to purchase vaccines for Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Australia will also allocate $219 mn to support last-mile vaccine rollouts and lead Quad’s last-mile delivery efforts.