NEW DELHI (AP) – India began providing coronavirus vaccines to its neighboring countries on Wednesday, when the world’s largest vaccine-producing nation strikes a balance between maintaining sufficient doses to inoculate its own people and helping countries developing countries with no capacity to produce their own vaccines.
India’s Foreign Ministry said the country would send 150,000 vaccines from the AstraZeneca / Oxford University vaccine, made locally by the Serum Institute of India, to Bhutan and 100,000 vaccines to the Maldives on Wednesday.
Vaccines will also be sent to Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar and Seychelles in the coming weeks, the ministry said, without specifying an exact deadline. He added in a statement on Tuesday that regulatory releases were still awaited from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Mauritius.
India’s ambassador to Nepal, Vinay Mohan Kwatra, said on Wednesday that New Delhi will supply Nepal with 1 million doses free of charge, with the first arriving as early as Thursday.
India’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Anurag Srivastava, said the government will ensure that national vaccine manufacturers have adequate supplies to meet India’s domestic needs as it supplies partner countries in the coming months.
“India will continue to supply vaccines to countries around the world. This will be calibrated against domestic needs and international demand and obligations, ”he said.
Indian regulators approved the emergency use of two vaccines earlier this month: the AstraZeneca vaccine and another from the Indian vaccine manufacturer Bharat Biotech. India started its own massive vaccination campaign on January 17, with the aim of inoculating 300 million of its nearly 1.4 billion inhabitants.
These vaccines sent to neighboring countries are being sent as donations and India’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the vaccines were not part of COVAX, the UN-supported global effort to help low-income countries obtain the vaccines.
With nations making their own plans and not waiting for COVAX, some experts fear that India’s gesture of goodwill may inadvertently undermine the initiative’s struggle, which has yet to deliver any of the promised 2 billion vaccines to poor countries. Although COVAX has announced new agreements to guarantee vaccines in recent weeks, it has only signed legally binding agreements for a fraction of the required vaccines.
WHO said earlier this week that it hopes that vaccines purchased by another Gates Foundation global initiative, GAVI, could begin to be distributed in poor countries later this month or next. The head of the UN health agency for Africa, however, estimated that the first COVID-19 vaccines from this initiative could only arrive in March and that a major launch would only begin in June.
Of the more than 12 billion doses of the coronavirus vaccine being produced this year, rich countries have already bought around 9 billion, and many have options to buy even more. This means that the Serum Institute, which was hired by AstraZeneca to produce one billion doses, is likely to make most of the injections that will be used by developing countries.
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Associated Press journalists Ashok Sharma in New Delhi and Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.
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