To Build on WHO’s Covaxin Approval

The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) grant of emergency use listing to Covaxin is good news for the world, for India’s reputation as a vaccine maker, for the commercial success of Bharat Biotech, the company that makes Covaxin, and, if played right, for India’s diplomatic heft globally.

The hugely unequal rates of vaccination in the rich world and the rest is a consequence, essentially, of vaccine production that falls far short of the requirement. WHO’s stamp of approval makes it possible for a wide set of countries to import Covaxin to meet their domestic requirements, including through the Covax programme for supplying vaccines to poor countries. But that approval is only a prerequisite.

Setting up enough Biosafety Level 3 labs to manufacture billions of doses of the vaccine still calls for much work: planning, investment and efficient, speedy execution. India is already the country that supplies the largest number of doses of assorted vaccines by volume. But few of these vaccines were developed in India. Covaxin, therefore, enhances India’s reputation as avaccine maker that can not only produce at scale but also develop one from scratch.


While there is much to recommend inactivated whole-virus vaccines, including easy storage, further advances in vaccines and cures would be centred on genetic technology. Indian companies and research labs need to master this field as well. The government must, in the case of Covaxin, encourage Bharat Biotech to set up production facilities in Africa and Latin America, in partnership with local companies.

That would contrast with the Chinese approach of trying to secure developing nations as captive markets, rather than as partners in development. India should buy out Covaxin’s intellectual property rights (IPR) and offer them as a global public good. This would both reward private enterprise and strengthen India’s demand to remove IPRs from all Covid-related vaccines and therapies. This is imperative, given the new drug announcements for treating Covid that have begun to appear, starting with Merck and Pfizer