Govt’s vaccine math: Zydus, Sputnik do not figure in official numbers, says AMICUS’ Dr Neelkantan

Some interesting facts have been laid out by the health ministry in an RTI response on the current vaccine procurement and the payments made against them. According to the RTI reply union government expects to procure 37.5 crore doses of Covishield, 28.5 crore doses of Covaxin between August and December. Apart from this, the government also expects to procure 30 crore doses of Corbevax from Biological E, which are expected to be delivered between September and December.

For the fresh procurement payments, that government aims to pay nearly Rs 2,500 crore to Serum Institute, nearly Rs 897 crore to Bharat Biotech and about Rs 1,500 crore have been paid to Biologically. However, when it comes to the payments made so far or the funds, which have been utilised so, far, the RTI response says that the government during March and July has actually used nearly Rs 9,229 crore out of the budgeted Rs 35,000 crore to procure vaccines till now, which is about 26.3 percent of the funds budgeted for this year.

If one closely looks at the price at which vaccines have been procured, the government has made full payments for the past procurement of Covisheild at about Rs 157 per dose to Serum Institute, amounting to around Rs 3,307 crore in terms of advances and the government has made an advance payment for future procurement of Covisheild of about Rs 2,421 crore to Serum Institute at Rs 215 per dose totalling to about Rs 5,700 crore payment made so far for Covisheild from March onwards.

When it comes to Covaxin procurement, the government has paid a full payment of about Rs 1,100 crore to Bharat Biotech for procuring vaccine doses at the rate of Rs 157 per dose and for future orders the government has made advanced payment of about Rs 897 crore to Bharat Biotech for procuring the vaccine at Rs 225 per dose totaling to about Rs 2,000 crore paid to Bharat Biotech.

According to the funds used of the total Rs 9,229 crore that has been utilised so far, the bulk payment has been made to serum Institute, which is nearly Rs 5,700 crore, Rs 2000 crore to Bharat Biotech and Rs 1,500 crore to Biological E, though it is not yet known whether the final procurement price of Corbevax from Biological E will be at Rs 50 per dose, because, in the RTI reply the government very clearly said that this is the partial advanced payment.

Therefore, it is not known whether it is going to be the final price per dose or whether this is just an initial advanced payment and once the vaccine starts coming, then there is a final price, which is revised.

Also, the government while answering the RTI says that from March to July it has procured nearly 29 crore doses -- 21 crore doses of Covishield and 7 crore doses of Covaxin. Till now, according to the RTI response government has not procured any doses of Sputnik V, which is also very important because only two vaccines have been procured as per the RTI reply.

The government is also adding that over 64 crore doses have been delivered to the states and the Union Territories, which include both central government procurement and direct state government procurement. This is also because during the current drive, some states were doing their own procurement. So for the initial part of the vaccination drive, that is from January to February, the government says that it used nearly Rs 1,300 crore from PM Cares Fund to procure both Covishield and Covaxin, which was a total of about 6.6 crore doses. All this information was in an RTI response filed by RTI activist Vivek Pandey.

To discuss this further, CNBC-TV18 spoke to Dr Murali Neelkantan of AMICUS, who has been tracking the vaccine story very closely.

The good news is that the average weekly vaccination count has picked up significantly for this week, we are almost at 80 lakh. It still begs the question what the supply is going to look like and if one were to focus on Covaxin because as per the RTI response, as well as what the government has previously said in its filing to the Supreme Court the estimates for Covaxin don't seem to be translating into actual delivery on the ground, even as per the RTI response 28.5 crore is the procurement target for Covaxin between August and December, and this seems to be a cause of concern.

Dr Neelkantan said it is a cause of worry. “I'm looking at the RTI that was filed previously and the RTI numbers that we have now. Until June, we had procurement numbers for Serum at 46.5 crore and Bharat Biotech procurement number at 26.5 crore. Now, if you add those to what we see from the data here, it seems like the Covishield supply is way more than what was estimated in May. So, we have got 46.5 plus 37.5 crore, which is more than the 750 million that was estimated in me. Are we now being told that Serums managed to increase its capacity to such an extent that it is able to beat that 750 million optimistic number we got in May.”

“If you now look at the Covaix number, we had such a low output all these months, we are now able to from this infer that they will make 550 million by the end of the year, which was the original May estimate before, we were told that things are not going according to plan, they will not be able to produce this per month. So I'm not really sure which number to follow and which number to trust,” he further said.

He added that these two RTI replies put together and the numbers that they have suggested that will make easily the numbers that is 2 billion.

"The surprise is Sputnik, which doesn't figure there and Zydus which doesn't figure there. So that's 150 million doses that were expected in the affidavit filed with the Supreme Court. But we don't see them here. So there seems to be some reallocation of numbers. How are we going to achieve it seems very unclear to me."