To meet the high demand of Covid vaccines in the country, the Centre should enable more companies to manufacture these vaccines for the benefit of the people of the country.

Addressing a digital press conference, AAP supremo and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said that the know-how on the manufacture of Covid vaccines — currently available only with Serum Institute of India and Bharat Biotech — could be shared with other firms and appropriate royalty be paid to the current two firms.

Currently, there are only two vaccine makers in India – Pune-based Serum Institute of India, which manufactures Covishield and Bharat Biotech, which manufactures Covaxin.

“Only two companies are now producing vaccines. They produce only 6-7 crore vaccines a month. This way it will take over two years to vaccinate everyone in the country. Many Covid-19 waves would have come by then. It is important to increase vaccine production on war footing and frame a national plan to vaccinate all. Not just two, several companies should be deployed to produce vaccines. Centre should collect the formula to produce vaccines from these two existing companies and give it to all those companies that can produce vaccine safely. Centre has the power to do this in these difficult times.”

Kejriwal said that right now Delhi was administering 1.25 lakh doses every day. “We will soon begin vaccinating over three lakh people daily. We aim to vaccinate all residents of Delhi within the next three months. However, we are facing vaccine shortage. We are left with stock that will last only a few days,” Kejriwal said.

Downward slide

Kejriwal highlighted that the number of new Covid infections are coming down in the national capital. He also said that the ongoing lockdown has been successful and the city has also been able to improve its health infrastructure.

“Even yesterday, we had started a new facility with 500 ICU beds. Delhi now has no scarcity of oxygen and ICU beds. In the next three months, we want to vaccinate everybody in Delhi. There is only vaccine shortage in Delhi and this is also becoming a big challenge before the country,” he said.

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