India pre-orders 600 million doses of covid-19 vaccine, to order a billion doses more

As the world continues to grapple with the increasing fear of covid-19, the race to develop a vaccine has even intensified. Even as the number of cases has shown a steady decline over the past few weeks in India, the fear of covid-19 is far from over. However, to much relief, India has an edge over other countries towards vaccination.

According to a new global analysis of advance market commitements (AMCS) for vacccines, India has repotredly used it manufacturing capability to pre-order 600 million doses of the vaccine. The report further said that India is also looking forward to pre-order another billion doses. Most of the vaccines being developed around the globe would require double dose to curb the infection. And if India succeeds in ordering a billion more doses, it would cover half of India's population.

India is only second to US, which has pre-ordered 810 million and is negotiating for 1.6 billion more doses.

As per an analysis, it has been noted that manufacturing enough vaccines to cover the world's population will take three to four years. The process to vaccination doses would be easy for high and middle income countries with manufacturing capacity.

“In terms of numbers of confirmed doses, the USA has pre-ordered the largest number (810 million confirmed, another 1.6 billion doses under negotiation), followed by India (600 million doses confirmed, with another 1 billion doses under negotiation), and the EU (400 million doses confirmed, another 1.565 billion doses under negotiation). But in terms of percent of population covered by confirmed purchases, Canada has pre-purchased enough vaccine to cover 527% of their population, followed by the UK at 277% of their population,” said Andrea D Taylor, assistant director of programmes at the Duke Global Health Innovation Center, who led the analysis.

“Of course, it is important to remember that most likely only some of the vaccine purchases will come through, depending on regulatory approval,” Taylor further said.

As of now, three vaccines are currently under late-stage clinical trials in India. These include Bharat Biotech's Covaxin developed with ICMR and NIV, Zydus Cadila's ZyCoV-D and Oxford-AstraZeneca in partnership with Serum Institute of India.