Serum Institute’s Adar Poonawalla assures successful rollout of booster doses based on stock availability

CEO of Serum Institute of India (SII) Adar Poonawalla has given assurance about the successful rollout of booster doses based on the stock availability with the biopharma company. While speaking on the sidelines of the Alternate Fuel Conclave in Pune, Poonawalla said that the biopharma company SII has appealed to the government to roll out booster doses for the country.

While emphasizing the fact that globally most countries have also rolled out booster doses as part of travel protocols abroad, Poonawala said that he has requested the government to roll out booster doses for the general population and is looking forward to a positive response from the central government.

Poonawala also said that a booster dose can be the same vaccine taken earlier or even a different vaccine while talking about mixing different doses of vaccines. While talking about the another wave of infections, he further added that the fourth wave of coronavirus infections would be a milder one.

The central government currently has permitted booster doses only for senior citizens, healthcare and frontline workers.

At the moment, SII has an annual vaccine manufacturing capacity of about 3 billion doses of both Covid and non-Covid vaccines. In March 2019, the company had an installed capacity of about 1.5 billion doses. It has doubled the manufacturing capacity at its Pune plant over the past two years.

SII has however halted the production of vaccines at its facility with decrease in demand for vaccination. According to sources, there were no fresh orders from the Central Government and supply commitments have ended as of March 31, 2022.

SII was now not making the Covishield vaccine anymore, as it had sufficient stocks to take care of both domestic and export demand. The company has accumulated about 250 million doses of Covishield stocks at its Pune facility. SII had indicated in December that it was halving the production of Covishield as it had a 500 million doses inventory at its facility. Half of these were finished doses, while the remaining was bulk doses that were not converted to formulation.