Serum chief warns of delays after US raw materials ban

Atemporary US ban on exports of critical raw materials could limit the production of coronavirus vaccines by companies such as the Serum Institute of India (SII), its chief executive said in a World Bank panel discussion on Thursday.

SII, the world’s biggest vaccine maker, has licensed the AstraZeneca/Oxford University product and will soon start bulk-manufacturing the Novavax shot.

“There are a lot of bags, filters and critical items that manufacturers need,” Adar Poonawalla said. “The Novavax vaccine, which we are a major manufacturer of, needs these items from the US.”

He said the recent invocation of the US Defence Production Act to preserve vaccine raw materials for its own companies went against the global goal of sharing vaccines equitably.

The White House said this week it had used the act to help drugmaker Merck & Co produce Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine.

“This really needs to be looked at because if they are talking about building capacity all over the world, the sharing of these critical raw materials, which just can’t be replaced in a matter of six months or a year, is going to become a critical limiting factor,” Poonawalla said. India’s Biological E has tied up with J&J to potentially contract manufacture up to 600 million doses of its vaccine per year. They have signed an initial deal but production volumes have not been agreed upon.

Meanwhile, India reported a slight drop in the number of new Covid-19 cases recorded in the last 24 hours on Friday, but the number of fatalities increased during the same period.

A total of 16,838 new cases in the last one day pushed the tally to 11,173,761, and 113 died, the Union Health Ministry said.

On Thursday, 89 people had died and 17,407 new cases were recorded.

Meanwhile, the active cases are rising gradually. In a day, it increased by 0.03 per cent pushing the current rate to 1.58 per cent. As per the Ministry’s data, there are 176,319 active cases presently and the death toll has reached 157,548,

The experts have expressed a number of possibilities which could be owed to the stride ranging from the lax attitude of people towards following the Covid protocols to likeability of “mutations and new strains” causing the surge, as has been studied by the laboratories involved in the Covid detection across the country. In mid February, officials had said that the average daily new infections oscillated between 9,000 to 12,000 while the deaths were between 78 to 120. On February 9, India had reported 9,110 new cases, the lowest this year so far. Last year, the lowest 9,633 cases were recorded on June 3.—