Russia sending another batch of 150,000 Sputnik V vaccines to India

Apart from Sputnik V, Russia is sending at least four medium oxygen generating trucks, which can feed a 200-bed hospital after being plugged into the power supply.

Published on: May 6, 2021, 11:20:30 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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Living up to its expectation as a trusted Indian strategic partner, Russia is sending another 150,000 doses of Sputnik V vaccines in the next two days, while another three million doses will be landing in Hyderabad with partner Dr Reddy’s Laboratories by May-end. Moscow has decided to ramp up Sputnik V doses to more than five million next month and more than 10 million vaccines in July.

Sputnik V: The first batch of the Russia-made vaccine arrived in India on May 1.

According to diplomats based in New Delhi and Moscow, Russia is sending at least four medium oxygen generating trucks, which can feed a 200-bed hospital after being plugged into the power supply. These trucks produce 70 kilograms of oxygen per hour and 50,000 litres per day so that there is no paucity of oxygen at the hospital to which they are attached. “We have already procured four such trucks and getting more so that oxygen paucity is reduced. These trucks will be landing by Russian IL-76 aircraft by the end of this week,” said a diplomat.

The first batch of 150,000 doses of Sputnik V arrived on May 1, the day when India opened its third phase of vaccination to people between the age group of 18 to 44 years. Sputnik V is based on human adenoviral vectors, is one of three vaccines (the other two are Pfizer and Moderna) that have an efficacy of over 90 per cent against the coronavirus disease, which is caused by SARS-CoV-2. It was given regulatory approval or restricted use authorisation in India on April 12.

The Russian medical support can be seen at Kalawati Hospital in Delhi with 75 ventilators, 20 large capacity oxygen concentrators and 150-bed monitors being installed at the Central Delhi hospital. Besides 60 large oxygen concentrators already on way through private donation, Russia has supplied 200,000 tablets of Fafivir drug, used for treating early stages of coronavirus, to all central AIIMS facilities in north India.

While Russia is keen to supply Remdesivir vials also, the Indian regulators simultaneously working out minor regulatory issues like getting the vials of Sputnik V labelled in English apart from the overall packaging. “New Delhi and Moscow are constantly in touch with each other through the diplomatic channels so that medical support is available on demand as much as possible,” said an Indian diplomat.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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