India has said it will ship to Bhutan, Maldives, Bangladesh and more.
LONDON – India has started exporting Covid-19 vaccines to neighboring countries, with the first batches being shipped on Wednesday to Bhutan, Maldives, Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar and Seychelles, the Foreign Ministry said.
“The first shipment takes off to Bhutan!” was the first in a flurry of tweets by Foreign Ministry spokesman Anurag Srivastava, when posting photos of lots leaving and arriving at different destinations, “Indian vaccines arrive in the Maldives, reflects our special friendship.”
“India is deeply honored to be a long-standing trusted partner in meeting the health needs of the global community,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted on Tuesday when he announced that the first shipments would be shipped today.
India is sending these batches of vaccines “with subsidized assistance,” said a press release from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as the government “has received several requests for the supply of vaccines manufactured by India from neighboring countries and important partners”
Dubbed “Neighborhood First”, Prime Minister Modi’s foreign policy focus has often been on improving ties with India’s immediate neighbors, which would explain the fate of these first vaccine shipments.
India’s Foreign Minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, said that his country was fulfilling “its commitment to give vaccines to humanity … The Pharmacy of the World will deliver to overcome the challenge of COVID”, he tweeted
. India is home to the world’s largest producer of vaccines by volume, the Serum Institute of India (SII), based in Pune.
The Serum Institute is producing the vaccine developed by Oxford University and Astra Zeneca under the local brand COVISHIELD and will distribute it to India, its neighboring countries and other low- and middle-income countries.
The SII is currently producing around 60 million doses of COVISHIELD per month and plans to increase that number to 100 million doses by March. The SII also agreed to supply COVAX, a WHO-supported alliance created to ensure equitable access to vaccines, with 200 million doses to be distributed in early 2021.
But the Serum Institute is not the only major vaccine producer in India. Bharat Biotech’s COVAXIN vaccine was also authorized for use by the Indian government in early January.
At the time, this measure was criticized by several experts who accused the government of rushing its decision because the data from the vaccine’s phase 3 tests had not been published.
Complete data on the vaccine’s efficacy is still expected and COVAXIN is not part of these initial exports, but, together with COVISHIELD, it is being launched internally.
India started the largest vaccination program in the world last Saturday and aims to reach 1.3 billion people as soon as possible.
India’s announcement of these vaccine exports comes at a time when the international community is warning that many lower-income countries are being left behind in the global launch of the vaccine.
“The world is on the verge of catastrophic moral failure,” said World Health Organization head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, at the opening of the annual WHO executive council meeting. “The price of this failure will be paid for with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries.”
The announcement from India was immediately approved by Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust and an infectious disease specialist who advises the UK government.
“This is a very important and much appreciated move from India to supply vaccines globally equitably. A public health, scientific and economic imperative ”, he tweeted.
Today’s move makes India the first to supply vaccines to these countries in South Asia, placing it ahead of China and COVAX.
Significantly, it will not send vaccines to its direct neighbor, Pakistan, with whom bilateral trade has been disrupted due to political disagreements over the disputed territories of Jammu and Kashmir.