India to restart Covid vaccine exports in June if local cases fall

The Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, will resume exports of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine in June but only if domestic coronavirus cases decline.

India suspended vaccine exports in March in an attempt to balance surging domestic demand with international orders.

On Tuesday the country hit a record 115,269 new coronavirus infections as its second wave accelerated faster than in Brazil and the US. Cases in India have surged after the spring festival of Holi last week.

Adar Poonawalla, the chief executive of Serum Institute, said the company would prioritise meeting demand in India in the next few months but hoped to restart international shipments in June “without compromising the needs of our country”.

Poonawalla added that if infections in the country of 1.4bn people continued to climb, the company would have to push back exports further.

“Europe is doing the same thing,” Poonawalla said. “They’ve banned exports, the US is banning raw materials for vaccines, so they might as well have banned exports of vaccines because they are preventing other vaccine manufacturers from scaling up.”

After a slow start to its vaccination campaign that was launched in the middle of January, India has expanded eligibility criteria for the jab to anyone aged 45 and older. The number of people being vaccinated jumped to more than 3.2m on Tuesday.

That figure is higher than the Serum Institute’s daily production capacity of 2.4m doses.

New Delhi has approved two vaccines for emergency use from the Serum Institute and the locally developed Bharat Biotech. Demand for the latter, however, has been low because of doubts over its efficacy, piling greater pressure on the Serum Institute to meet the bulk of Indian orders.

Poonawalla also cautioned that the vaccine was not “bulletproof”. He explained that other vaccines, including those for pneumonia and rotavirus, did not offer protection from “complete disease penetration and transmission” but worked to lessen the severity of the disease.

He acknowledged that variants represented a “question mark” about vaccines’ effectiveness. “Nothing today created by man is 100 per cent,” he said. “It works most of the time but not all the time.”

The Serum Institute has asked New Delhi for a grant to expand production capacity. A fire that broke out this year delayed the expansion of monthly Covid-19 vaccine production from about 70m doses a month to 100m doses.