NEW DELHI, Feb 4: The Pune-based Serum Institute of India (SII) has told the Bangladesh pharmaceutical company Beximco to wait for the supply of additional doses of Corona vaccine it had ordered for private sale.
Beximco last week received 5 million of the 30 million doses it had ordered from SII for Bangladesh’s immunisation programme that begins next week.
But the company said on Thursday that SII had delayed the first supply of the vaccine for private sale giving priority to the government’s immunization campaign both at home and in Bangladesh.
Beximco had separately ordered one million doses for sale on the private market, with the hope to start marketing it this month.
“However, the company has now been informed by SII that the first installment (500,000 doses) of this supply will be delayed following a prioritisation on supplying vaccine doses for government mass vaccination programmes and WHO-led COVAX initiatives over private pay use,” Beximco said in a regulatory filing.
“It remains unclear how long this delay will last.”
Beximco’s chief operating officer had told the media last month that the company could buy up to 3 million doses of the vaccine from SII at about $8 each for sale on the private market.
The price is about twice the $4 per dose that Beximco had agreed for the government programme.
Meanwhile, the central government has expressed caution over high weekly positive rate in eight states and union territories in the country even when the overall situation was improving with the number of daily infections and deaths coming down.
The health secretary Rajesh Bhushan said on Thursday. “It is definitely worrying that the weekly positivity rate in these eight states and union territories are more than the national positivity rate. We are in constant touch with the administrations and are sending national team,” the secretary said.
Weekly positivity rate is the average percentage of people testing positive in a week. India has a weekly positivity rate of 1.82 per cent.
As against it, eight states /UTs have higher weekly positivity ate than the national rate. This included Kerala (11.20%), Chhattisgarh (6.20%), Maharashtra (4.70%), Goa (4.40%), Nagaland (3.60%), Ladakh (2.90%), Puducherry (2.60%) and Chandigarh (2.10%).
India at present has only 1.55 lakh active Covid-19 cases. Kerala and Maharashtra are the only two states with more than 35,000 active cases — Kerala (69.365), Maharashtra (38,762).
On global Covid-19 situation, the secretary said, “Countries have experienced multiple peaks…and if we compare death figures, the number is again increasing in other countries. It means more people are contracting the disease and getting admitted to the hospital, probably beyond the capacity of the hospitals there. They are not getting proper treatment and that’s why the number of deaths in these countries is on the rise. In India, the situation is absolutely the opposite.”
(Manas Dasgupta)
