Will Centre review its liberalised vaccine policy? Experts discuss
India is the only country where the government has asked states to separately negotiate to buy vaccines, and as of now, there is no significant update on vaccine supply till at least July if not later. The big question now is how will states plan reopening and the lifting of COVID restrictions without clarity on vaccine supply? To discuss this, CNBC-TV18 spoke to Sanjiv Navangul, MD & CEO of Bharat Serums & Vaccines; Dr V Ravi, Virologist and Member, K'taka COVID Technical Committee; Murali Neelakantan, Principal Lawyer at Amicus and Rajeshwari Hariharan, Founder of Rajeshwari & Associates.
A broader look at the numbers reveals a bleak picture of the total vaccines administered so far. 78 percent have received only a single dose and 22 percent have received the second dose.
This takes the percentage of fully-vaccinated Indians to just a little over three percent of the population. The liberalised vaccine policy announced by the government in April has become more or less redundant.
According to the policy, vaccine manufacturers are required to give 50 percent of their supply to the central government, and the remaining to states and private players.
However, with supply being a constraint, several states have been compelled to shut down vaccination centres owing to no supply for 18-44 years category. The decision to let Indian states individually buy vaccines from global producers has also hit a wall.
Global vaccine makers like Pfizer and Moderna have clearly conveyed their preference to deal with the Centre as a single entity for procurement of vaccines, rather than deal with each state separately.
Moderna and Pfizer have told the Punjab and Delhi governments that they will deal directly with the centre.
India is the only country where the government has asked states to separately negotiate to buy vaccines, and as of now, there is no significant update on vaccine supply till at least July if not later. The big question now is how will states plan reopening and the lifting of COVID restrictions without clarity on vaccine supply?
To discuss this, CNBC-TV18 spoke to Sanjiv Navangul, MD & CEO of Bharat Serums & Vaccines; Dr V Ravi, Virologist and Member, K'taka COVID Technical Committee; Murali Neelakantan, Principal Lawyer at Amicus and Rajeshwari Hariharan, Founder of Rajeshwari & Associates.
Dr V Ravi said, “It is probably now advisable for the central government to take requirements from each of the states and then float a single global tender. It will have two advantages manufacturers would like to negotiate with one customer rather than with many customers, two the negotiating power for the central government also will be very good.”
He added, “Before we review the policy, we should make an attempt from the central government to see if we can procure vaccines for the country and then distribute it based on the requirements of the states, of course, the money will be paid by the state governments.”
Sanjiv Navangul said, “The transparency that is required to ensure that there is an equitable distribution of vaccines is very important. In a public health scenario where we are dealing with a pandemic, it is important that everybody knows exactly what is happening to the extent possible."
"Of course we should concentrate on the fact that it is not 18-44 or 44 plus the fact remains that we have to vaccinate 940 million adults at the earliest possible time.”
Murali Neelakantan said, “We already had four reviews of the policy in three weeks, there is no big announcement by the Prime Minister, but there have been changes and very significant changes in the policy in the last one month.”
Watch accompanying video for more.
(Edited by : Bivekananda Biswas)
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