India is pushing to greatly expand production of its home-grown Covaxin jab and expects to hit the rate of some 100 million doses per month by September. The country has experienced a sharp increase in new Covid-19 cases lately.
Currently, India makes around 10 million doses of Bharat Biotech’s jab, the country’s Ministry of Science & Technology said in a statement on Friday. The manufacturing level is set to change in the months to come, with output expected to grow sharply as a result.
“The current production capacity of indigenously developed Covaxin vaccine will be doubled by May-June 2021 and then increased nearly six-, seven-fold by July-August 2021,” the ministry said.
Earlier in the day, state-run Haffkine Bio-Pharmaceutical said it has also been contracted to produce Bharat Biotech’s jab. The Mumbai-based company said it expects to manufacture some 228 million per annum, though setting up the production line is expected to take at least a year.
“A proposal was submitted in January this year owing to the rising cases of coronavirus and need for more vaccines to immunize a large number of people. It is an ambitious project which is important from the angle of vaccination of such a large population,” Haffkine Bio-Pharmaceutical said.
India is enduring a severe new wave of coronavirus infections. Over the past nine days, the country registered eight record daily increases. The latest was set on Friday, with more than 217,000 new cases reported by the health ministry.
The country’s death toll grew by 1,185 over the past 24 hours, marking the deadliest day in over seven months. Some parts of India have reintroduced lockdown measures in an attempt to contain the spread of the virus.
India is the second worst coronavirus-hit nation in the world in terms of absolute figures, with nearly 14.3 million Covid-19 cases registered since the beginning of the pandemic. The country’s tally is dwarfed only by the US, which is approaching the 31.5 million-cases mark.
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