Pune-based Serum Institute of India (SII) on Wednesday, 21 April, announced that it had fixed the price of their Covishield vaccine at Rs 600 per dose for private hospitals and Rs 400 per dose for state governments.
SII also said that it was addressing the vaccine shortages in the country by scaling up production.
The vaccine maker added that for the next two months, 50 percent of their capacity would be served to the Government of India’s vaccination programme, while the other 50 percent would be reserved for state governments and private hospitals.
SII said the prices were still more affordable than foreign vaccines, which cost between Rs 750 to Rs 1,500 per dose.
The release from SII further said that since it was challenging to supply the vaccine to individual corporate entities, they are requested to access it directly through state-facilitated machinery and private health systems.
After four to five months, the vaccines will be available in retail and free trade, SII said.
SII CEO Lauds PM, FM for Aid, Policies to Boost Vaccine Production
The announcement from SII comes a day after CEO Adar Poonawalla thanked PM Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman for “decisive policy changes and swift financial aid, which will help vaccine production and distribution in India”.
Poonawalla’s message thanking the two was in light of the Finance Minister agreeing to sanctioning supply credit to COVID-19 vaccine manufactures Bharat Biotech and SII.
The Ministry had cleared a credit of Rs 3,000 crore for SII and Rs 1,500 crore for Bharat Biotech.
Wednesday’s release from SII also thanked the government for this measure and said that these “promising directives” would help scale up vaccine production.
The decision to sanction funds for the two pharmaceutical companies came after Poonawalla requested the government for a Rs 3,000-crore grant to ramp up production capacity of the COVID-19 vaccine beyond 100 million doses a month.
SII produces the Oxford-Astra Zeneca vaccine, which is marketed as Covishield in India.
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)