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

Addressing a virtual press conference, Kejriwal said 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 these two firms.

“Only two companies now produce vaccines. They produce only 6 to 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. The 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.”

On Tuesday, Kejriwal wrote a letter to the Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking his intervention in the matter of handing over the vaccine formula to more companies.

Downward slide

Kejriwal highlighted at the press conference 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.

Meanwhile, in the last 24 hours to Tuesday, Delhi’s new Covid-19 infections declined to 12,481, the lowest daily tally since April 12. On Monday, the new Covid-19 infections stood at 12,651. The daily test positivity rate slid down further to 17.76 per cent, the lowest since April 16.

However, the number of daily deaths went up to 347 on Tuesday, the latest Delhi State Health Bulletin showed. This was higher than the 319 deaths as of Monday and 273 recorded on Sunday.

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