In Cards: Is India Prepared to Make Enough COVID Vaccine Doses?

According to a research by Credit Suisse, India needs about 1.7 billion Covid-19 vaccine doses to vaccinate majority of its adult population. It targets to administer 400-500 million doses by July 2021.

The key vaccines India is banking on are from Oxford/AstraZeneca, Novavax, and J&J as the temperature range of these vaccines is about 2-8-degree Celsius (vs -20-degree Celsius for Moderna and -70-degree Celsius for Pfizer).

The bottleneck is cold storage infrastructure (especially refrigerated vans) and by using a part of the capacity of current immunisation programme (600 million doses) and the cold chain infrastructure of the private sector (250-300 million doses), potential vaccinations can reach 550-600 million doses annually.  

Skilled manpower required to administer 550-600 million doses is less than 1 lakh, the report said, according to the news agency IANS.

Here are some key research findings:

(With inputs from IANS)