PUNE, India: As much of the world struggled to get supplies of Covid-19 vaccine last month, more than 50 million doses were chilled in a warehouse in western India, stacked in addition to 50 feet tall.
The storage company, Serum Institute of India, used to be little known outside the vaccine industry, but its ability to increase production to more than 70 million doses a month has now placed it and India at the center of the fight against the pandemic.
The United States, Japan and Australia have just pledged more than $ 200 million to help Indian companies expand their capabilities more quickly and add a billion doses to global supply. Leveraging India’s vaccine production capabilities was the focus of virtual talks on Friday between the leaders of those three countries and India, an alliance that seeks to counter Chinese expansionism known as Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad.
China and Russia have supplied domestically produced vaccines to much of the developing world, while the United States has so far focused much of its efforts on securing supplies to Americans.
“We are talking about large investments in creating additional vaccine capacity in India to export them to countries in the Indo-Pacific region to improve them,” said India’s Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla , in an information session after the Quad summit on Friday. “We’re talking about the actual immunization of people across an entire region.”