A little over a month after the World Health Organisation and other Covax stakeholders expressed concerns over the shortfall of Covid-19 vaccine supplies from India, Gavi – the vaccine alliance – is hopeful that Serum Institute of India (SII) will be able to resume exports soon.

Serum supplies the AstraZeneca-OxfordUniversity vaccine in India and to other low- and middle-income countries. But exports were paused following the second wave of Covid-19 in India that saw an increase in cases and deaths.

“We remain hopeful that SII deliveries will resume in the third quarter, however, this cannot be confirmed at this stage,” a GAVI spokesperson told BusinessLine . “In the meantime, Covax has been aggressively following through on its strategy of diversifying its portfolio, securing over a billion additional doses in the past month alone, either through direct procurements or through dose sharing,” she added.

Surge in cases

Recent reports have suggested that Covid-19 vaccine exports may resume by the end of the year, but industry insiders indicated that no such direction had been received from the government.

In May, the WHO, Gavi, Covax, CEPI and Unicef had said in a joint statement that the terrible surge of the virus in India had impacted the supply to Covax in the second quarter of the year – a shortfall of 190 million doses by June-end.

And though Covax will have larger volumes available to it later in the year through the deals already secured with several manufacturers, “if we do not address the current shortfall, the consequences could be catastrophic”, they had said.

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