THE Centre may have opened the regulatory door to a set of vaccines from overseas but how it works its pricing and procurement strategy could be key to their entry and rollout.
For most nations, the vaccine rollout adheres to one simple maxim: countries that invested “at risk” before the products cleared regulatory scrutiny ended up extracting a better pricing deal from manufacturers in the end. So far, India, with the world’s biggest vaccine manufacturing base, seems to be the only exception.
The NDA government is learnt to have negotiated the cost of Covishield — Serum Institute of India’s (SII) version of the AstraZeneca-University of Oxford vaccine — to Rs 150 plus GST, or around $2.02, per dose. This is lower than the $2.15 at which AZ is supplying to the European Union, which invested $399 million “at risk” in AstraZeneca way back in August 2020, in return for 400 million doses of its vaccine.
Read more at : https://indianexpress.com/article/india/coronavirus-door-for-global-vaccines-opens-but-pricing-strategy-could-be-key-to-entry-7272534/
