Vaccine manufacturer Zydus Cadila on Saturday said it would be able to produce around 3-4 crore doses of its DNA vaccine by December as against the government’s hope of getting 5 crore doses from the Gujarat based maker of India’s first Covid-19 vaccine for kids.
A commercial rollout of the ZyCov-D vaccine with 30-40 lakh doses may happen by September but the company will start producing one crore doses of the DNA vaccine by October end.
"We hope to produce three to four crore doses by December. It's not possible to manufacture five crore doses within that period because of the delay of 45 days in commissioning our new manufacturing plant,” Sharvil Patel, managing director of Zydus Cadila said at a press meet. The 5 crore target may be met by January.
The Centre had earlier informed the Supreme Court that it hoped to procure 5 crore doses from Zydus as a part of its planned purchase of 135 crore doses that are required to vaccinate the target population of 94.47 crore individuals. The target, however, doesn’t include the 12-18-year-olds.
The homegrown DNA vaccine on Friday received regulatory approval for emergency use in India, thus becoming the world’s first commercial DNA vaccine. This is also the second indigenous Covid-19 vaccine after Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin.
Patel said he would not be needing any further approval from the government to launch the vaccine for anyone above 12 years, but sources said the government might provide a policy guideline on when to start the vaccination for such a category and whether some of the adolescents with comorbidities will get a preference.
The vaccine doses for the adolescents would be the same as adults, he said, adding that the efficacy for the children would be considered the same as the adults – 66.6%. As a part of its phase-III clinical trial, a separate study was conducted involving 1,400 children.
Asked about expanding the manufacturing capacity, Patel said Zydus had signed Expression of Interest with two-three Indian manufacturers, who might be roped in to augment the vaccine production. The plasmid DNA platform used to produce the vaccine provides ease of manufacturing with minimal biosafety requirements (BSL-1).
ZyCov-D becomes the sixth Covid vaccine in India and comes after Covishield, Covaxin, Sputnik, Moderna and the single-shot vaccine of Johnson and Johnson.