PUNE, India – While much of the world struggled to secure the supply of the Covid-19 vaccine last month, more than 50 million doses were cooling in a warehouse in western India, stacked more than 15 meters high.
The stock company, Serum Institute of India, was little known outside the vaccine industry, but its ability to increase production to more than 70 million doses per month now puts it and India solidly at the center of the stage in the fight against the pandemic.
The US, Japan and Australia have just pledged more than $ 200 million to help Indian companies expand their capabilities more quickly and add a billion doses to the global supply. Exploring India’s vaccine production capacities was at the center of virtual talks on Friday between the leaders of these three countries and India, an alliance that seeks to stem the Chinese expansionism known as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad.
China and Russia have been supplying domestically produced vaccines to much of the developing world, while the United States has so far focused many of its efforts on securing supplies for Americans.
“We are talking about huge investments in creating additional vaccine capacities in India, for export to countries in the Indo-Pacific region for their improvement,” said India’s Foreign Secretary, Harsh Vardhan Shringla, in a briefing after the Quad summit on Friday. “We are talking about actually immunizing people across an entire region.”