Covishield comprises over 90% of the total COVID-19 vaccines administered in India

NEW DELHI: A data recently released by the Government of India stated that Covishield vaccine, from the stable of Oxford-AstraZeneca, comprises over 90 per cent of the total vaccine administered across the country, which amounts to around 12.76 crore doses. IT established that out of all the states, 15 states and union territories were only supplied with Covishield vaccine, which is being manufactured by the Pune-based Serum Institute of India.

The other vaccine being administered to people in India is Covaxin, developed by Bharat Biotech. According to GoI’s CO-WIN portal, of the total 127,605,870 COVID-19 vaccination jabs administered till date across India, 11,60,65,107 are of Covishield and 1,15,40,763 are of Covaxin.

Experts have said that Covishield is being produced at a much higher scale than Covaxin. However, Dr. Samiran Panda, the Head of Epidemiology and Communicable Diseases at the Indian Council of Medical Research, said that the production of Covaxin will be ramped up soon. According to a statement by Bharat Biotech, capacity expansion for Covaxin has been implemented across multiple facilities in Hyderabad and Bangalore. This has been done to reach capacity of approximately 700 million doses per year. In a bid to enhance vaccine production capacity, the Department of Biotechnology has also been providing financial supports in form of grants to vaccine manufacturing facilities.

According to a statement released by the Ministry of Science and Technology on April 18, the current production of indigenously developed vaccine in India will be doubled by May-June 2021 and then will be increased by nearly 6-7 folds by July-August 2021.