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Indian COVISHIELD consignment delayed; “vaccine diplomacy” in motion
Sri Lanka will not receive the expected balance of a million doses of COVISHIELD vaccine from the Serum Institute of India (SII) on the time-line earlier pledged, the Sunday Times can further confirm today.
“We are unable to meet that commitment, leave alone in mid-March and April,” a top source from the Pune (Maharashtra) based Institute, who spoke on strict grounds of anonymity, told the Sunday Times.
His remarks were made this week after the management earlier weighed options of issuing a statement on the disrupted supplies to Sri Lanka in the backdrop of a campaign of misinformation by a State Minister and an official of the State Pharmaceuticals Corporation (SPC) carried out through the local media. They claimed the stocks were due as scheduled.
The SII source said, “This (agreement) is one of several additional capacities we were to fulfil on behalf of AstraZeneca and the Indian government. The fire did not affect production as such, but due to increasing commitments, we need to ramp up our capacity. Hence this delay”.
However, the SPC issued a statement on Friday night while confirming the fact that the SII had reneged on its earlier commitment to provide the vaccines (a part in March and the balance in April), stating that due to the long standing commercial relations between the SPC and the SII, and Government-to-Government level talks initiated by Sri Lanka, the SII had ensured the vaccines would arrive “as previously agreed”. No specific dates for these consignments arriving in Sri Lanka have been mentioned, though.
The Indian External Affairs Ministry’s official spokesperson Anurag Srivastava and the Indian High Commission spokesman Eldos Mathew Punnoose refused to confirm or deny reports that the Indian Government has intervened to get the one million additional doses from the Serum Institute as originally agreed. While Mr. Srivastava referred the matter to the High Commission in Colombo, Mr. Punnoose asked for time to respond.
This refusal to make a formal response was in marked contrast to the wide publicity generated by the High Commission over the arrival of the first gratis consignment of the vaccine from India last month.
SPC General Manager K.M.R.D. Dassanayake admitted that he had not seen the March 3 letter from the SII to the SPC Chairman when he told the media that the first consignment of stocks of the vaccine would arrive in Sri Lanka as scheduled. With this being mid-March already, later the same media reports suggested the first consignment would arrive at the end of March.
Mr. Dassanayake said that after the Sunday Times published the SII letter of March 3, the SPC raised the issue with the Serum Institute by email and telephone calls. He refused to divulge further details of the SII response, citing a Non-Disclosure Agreement between the two parties.
In a March 3 dated letter to SPC Chairman Dr Prasanna Gunasena, the SII CEO Adar C. Poonawalla declared, “SII’s vaccine manufacturing expansion has met an obstacle, which affects our ability to supply you in the near future.” Pointing out that the Institute signed “additional agreements with governments, Mr Poonawallah said, “to meet these supply commitments we commenced expansion of our manufacturing facilities.” However, he added “Regrettably, a fire at one of our buildings has caused obstacles to the expansion of our monthly manufacturing output.”
Mr Poonawalla’s remarks were in marked contrast to what he told the INDIA TODAY magazine on January 21, after a fire in the SII complex left five people dead. “I would like to reassure all governments and the public that there would be no loss of COVISHIELD production due to multiple production buildings that I had kept in reserve to deal with such contingencies.”
The letter said that “to support the global effort fighting the pandemic, the SII had recently signed additional agreements with governments outside of the scope of its original sub-licence agreement with AstraZeneca”. The letter urged the SPC to “bear with us” till the SII evaluates options to expand its capacity “in the coming months”. This whole week, the SII refused to officially make any further announcement of a change in its position.
Meanwhile, Friday’s SPC statement stated that it was also exploring avenues of obtaining the Russian Sputnik V, China’s Sinovac, Pfizer, AstraZeneca UK and India Bharath Biotech vaccines.