SII has stockpile of 200 mn doses; India better prepared to fight Covid: CEO

Poonawalla said he is waiting for the government to allow the company to put Covovax on the CoWIN app to make it available to everyone. Covovax has been approved by the DCGI for children above 12 years of age.

Chief executive officer (CEO) of Serum Institute of India (SII) Adar Poonawalla on Tuesday said the company has a stockpile of 200 million doses of Covishield, while it has already exported 40 million doses of Covovax to European countries and Australia.

Serum Institute of India CEO Adar Poonawalla speaks at the 'AIMA Leadership Conclave' in New Delhi on Tuesday,(PTI)

"We have a stockpile of 200 million doses of Covishield...We've already exported 40 million doses of Covovax to European countries, Australia. It's for the first time that a vaccine made in India is sold in Europe," news agency ANI quoted Poonawalla as saying.

Poonawalla also said that India is better prepared to face it now than it was in 2020. "We are definitely far better prepared than we were in 2020. In 2020, we did not have the testing capabilities, the genomic sequencing. We didn't have any of that. We didn't have the hospital infrastructure that we have here today," he said.

Poonawalla said he is waiting for the government to allow the company to put Covovax on the CoWIN app to make it available to everyone. Covovax has been approved by the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) for children above 12 years of age.

"If it's taken in the government programme also, then SII will charge the same price of ₹225 even for the private market," he said.

When asked about the mix-and-match trials of Covid-19 vaccines such that Covovax is used as a booster, Poonawalla said SII has been asked to conduct a study on that.

Meanwhile, SII has appealed to the government to reduce the gap between the second and booster dose to six months from nine months at present to safeguard people against emerging Covid variants, according to Poonawalla.

Recalling that they could not meet the commitment of exporting vaccines in the first quarter of 2021 due to "so much noise from public and the opposition", Poonawalla also pitched for a global pact for vaccine utilisation.

He noted that India and SII faced severe reputation damage when the export of vaccines was banned for nearly two months during the second wave.

"The uptake (for precaution dose) right now is a bit slow as we have a rule that you have to wait for nine months between dose two and dose three. We have appealed to the government and the experts, who are having discussions regarding the matter, to reduce this period to six months," he said during an AIMA event.