The Centre has informed the Kerala High Court that its new Liberalized Pricing and Accelerated National Covid-19 Vaccination Strategy is aimed at incentivising the vaccine manufacturers to rapidly scale up their production and to attract new vaccine manufacturers.
In a statement filed in response to a few petitions challenging the liberalised pricing policy, the Centre submitted that it would make pricing, procurement and administration of vaccines more flexible and ensure augmented vaccine production as well as wider availability of vaccines in the country.
The Centre added that tightly controlling the price of vaccines may cause difficulty in securing adequate and multiple vaccine supplies, especially from offshore manufacturers. In the current scenario where vaccination was a critical tool for prevention and mitigation of pandemic, it was only advisable to allow vaccines additionally in the open market.
In fact, under the new vaccine strategy, each State government should procure the vaccine. However, the Central government had by conducting informal consultations with the vaccine manufactures, ensured that the price of vaccine was uniform for all the States so as to avoid any disparity resulting from one State ending up buying vaccines at a higher price than the other, it said
The Centre also submitted that it had facilitated and supported two public sector undertakings such as Indian Immunological, Hyderabad and Haffkine, Mumbai to produce Covaxin, which is licensed by Bharat Biotech International Ltd. The Centre's Department of Biotechnology is also providing financial support for the same. The other Indian manufacturer, Serum Institute of India is producing Covid vaccine named Covishield in India under the license from a foreign vaccine manufacturer Astra Zeneca. Therefore, Covishield vaccine cannot be given to other manufacturers for further production without license from the parent company, Astra Zeneca.