India Likely To Face Vaccine Shortage For Next Few Months: Serum Institute’s CEO Adar Poonawalla

Chief executive of Pune-based vaccine maker Serum Institute of India (SII), Adar Poonawalla has said that India is likely to face a shortage of COVID-19 vaccines for the next few months, reports Economic Times.

Though SII is presently pursuing an expansion of its capacity to produce Covishield vaccines, Poonawalla said that it had not expanded the capacity earlier due to lack of orders. He said, "There were no orders, we did not think we needed to make more than 1 billion doses a year."

With the expansion of capacity presently underway, SII is expected to increase its production of Covishield vaccines from the present 60-70 million doses a month to 100 million doses from July.

Since the beginning of the nationwide vaccination drive on 16 January, India has so far given at least one dose of either Covishield or Bharat Biotech's Covaxin COVID-19 vaccines to over 157 million people who make up about 12 per cent of the population. Over two per cent of the population has received two doses so far.