India, having one of the world’s largest vaccine manufacturing industries that supplied vaccines to more than 150 countries and met 65-70% of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO)vaccine requirements, is willing to offer its robust vaccine manufacturing industry for developing vaccines for BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), as well as the world,” Union Health Minister Dr. Mansukh Mandaviya said on Tuesday while launching the BRICS Vaccine R&D Center and Workshop on Vaccine Cooperation through video conference.
The Government of India would help to pool together complementary advantages of the BRICS countries in vaccine research and development and boost their capacity to prevent and control infectious diseases, besides providing timely help to other developing countries in need, he stated.
The Minister proposed that BRICS countries should work together to support endeavours such as ACT-A, COVAX, CEPI, etc., to achieve the WHO’s laid target of vaccinating 70% of the world’s population with COVID-19 vaccines by mid-2022.
“Apart from pandemic and health emergencies, there is an ample scope of collaboration among countries like in the field of vaccine preventable diseases with high morbidity and mortality and for those diseases with no vaccines available currently such as AIDS, TB etc,” he observed.
India had so far approved nine vaccines for COVID-19 emergency use, of which five were indigenous. This also involved world’s first of a kind m-RNA vaccine Gennova that had been developed indigenously, and produced outside the WHO transfer technology programme.
