PUNE, India – While much of the world struggled last month to secure supplies of Covid-19 vaccines, more than 50 million doses were chilling in a warehouse in Western India, stacked over 50 feet high.
The stock company, Serum Institute of India, was previously little known outside of the vaccine industry, but its capacity to ramp up production to over 70 million doses per month has now put it and India firmly at the center of the fight against the pandemic.
The US, Japan and Australia have just pledged more than $ 200 million to help Indian companies expand their capacity faster and add a billion doses to the global supply. Tapping into India’s vaccine production capacity was central to virtual talks Friday between the leaders of those three countries and India, an alliance trying to counter Chinese expansionism known as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or the Quad.
China and Russia have supplied domestically produced vaccines to much of the developing world, while the US has so far focused much of its efforts on securing supplies for Americans.
“We are talking about massive investment in creating additional vaccine capacity in India, for export to countries in the Indo-Pacific region for their improvement,” Indian Foreign Minister Harsh Vardhan Shringla said during a briefing after the Quad Summit. Friday. “We’re talking about really immunizing people across an entire region.”