NEW DELHI – Two of India’s largest vaccine manufacturers have cut the prices of their coronavirus vaccines for private hospitals by more than half.
The companies, the Serum Institute of India and Bharat Biotech, both announced price cuts on Saturday, a day after India said it would expand access to booster doses to most adults, but only to private health facilities and to paying recipients.
“We are pleased to announce that, after consultation with the central government, SII has decided to review the price of Covishield vaccine for private hospitals,” said Adar Poonawalla, the director of Serum Institute, on Twitter using the company’s brand name for the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine.
Minutes later, Suchitra Ella, a co-founder of Bharat Biotech, made a similar announcement on Covaxin, the first coronavirus vaccine made in India, saying the injection would be available in private hospitals for 225 rupees, or about $3, a price cut of more than 80 percent.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is under pressure to make vaccines more affordable. But critics said the government’s decision to require Indians to pay for booster doses would penalize poorer people, especially in rural areas, where there are fewer private health facilities.
“The central feature of this new policy is discrimination by design,” Abhishek Singhvi of the Indian National Congress, the main opposition party, said. said on Sunday. ‘You mean you don’t care about the rural population? Are you suggesting that you don’t care about the less privileged?”
India’s leading health experts have also raised questions about the policy. “What happens to poor people who are under the age of 60 and may have declining immunity? We don’t know how many of them are currently at risk or will be in the near future,” Dr K. Srinath Reddy, the chairman of the Public Health Foundation of India, wrote in an op-ed on Saturday.
Both the Serum Institute, the world’s largest vaccine producer, and the government of India have long faced criticism over vaccine pricing and availability. During a devastating second wave of Covid-19 last April, Mr Poonawalla and his company were sued by politicians and the public for increasing the price of doses.
Last June, Modi’s government said it would take over vaccine procurement and end its heavily criticized policy of leaving individual states to negotiate prices directly with vaccine manufacturers, at a time when shots were scarce worldwide. .
On Sunday, the government said states have received more than 1.8 billion doses as of early 2021 and have more than 174 million unused injections on hand.
India’s health ministry said on Friday booster shots would be available to people aged 18 to 60 from Sunday, but people will have to wait at least nine months between their second and third doses. One reason to approve boosters for more people, experts said, is that many Indians who have only received two doses find it difficult to travel abroad without booster certificates. India lifted its ban on international commercial flights last month.
The country has fully vaccinated 61 percent of the population and 1.7 percent of people have been boosted, according to the University of Oxford’s Our World in Data project. Most had been vaccinated with Covishield.
The daily average of cases has fallen about 40 percent in the past two weeks, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, as India emerges from an Omicron peak. The average number of deaths has fallen by 92 percent over the same period.
Experts say that while India has weathered the latest wave, risks remain. “If a new variant emerges with a higher virulence or causes a large wave due to a higher infectivity, the proportion of vulnerable adults could increase,” wrote Dr. Reddy in his article, adding, “If this happens, vaccine policy could be reconsidered.”
Sophie Downes contributed reporting.