India to play major role in vaccine production

A VERY large portion of Covid-19 vaccines are likely to be manufactured in India through the country's strong and robust private sector partners, said Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman.

In an interview, Suzman noted that India is doing everything it can right now with the resources at hand to fight the Covid-19 pandemic.

‘I think India is doing everything it can right now with the resources at hand, but we are all hopeful that next year as some of these vaccines should come out...and our expectation is that a very large portion of these are likely to be manufactured in India through the strong and robust Indian private sector partners and then that will be the key area to focus on in the next phase of the Covid-19 pandemic,' he said.

He underlined the need to have equitable global distribution of Covid-19 vaccines. ‘We believe passionately that there needs to be equitable global distribution, so everything we are doing is to make sure that the developing countries will be able to have access at the same time and at the same volumes as wealthy countries, because for a global pandemic that is essential, but then the exact pacing and distribution within the countries is going to depend on national guidelines with some of the global recommendations,' he said.

He said the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been working at multiple levels to combat Covid-19. ‘We have been providing support, so called upstream, or research and development. We work with this organization, CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation, which has been a leading partner in investing in the potential vaccines. We have developed something called a therapeutic accelerator which has raised over $125 million to help find treatments that are going to be effective against Covid,' he said.

He said the foundation has been working to support a lot of work around diagnostics as well. ‘And in that context, we are strong supporters of this global effort, which India is part of, called COVAX, which is a multilateral initiative to procure vaccines at scale and then distribute them through the GAVI vaccine alliance to countries including India,' Suzman added.