Made-in-India vaccine ready for world, says PM

New Delhi: India will soon make available many more Covid vaccines to other countries after two Made-In-India jabs have already been introduced to the world, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Thursday while emphasising the country’s global responsibility in fighting the pandemic.

In a special address at the World Economic Forum’s online Davos Agenda Summit, Modi also said he wants to assure the global business community that situation will now change rapidly on the economic front also and invited businesses from all over to participate in India’s growth journey. Modi said that some had said in February-March 2020 that India would be the worst affected country by Covid and would face a “tsunami of corona infections.”

“Some had talked about 70-80 crore people expected to get infected in India, while some talked about over 20 lakh possible deaths but India did not let the disappointment get better of it,” he said. Modi said, “We transformed the fight against coronavirus into a people’s movement and today India is among the most successful countries in saving lives.”

“We focussed on developing Covid-specific health infrastructure, we trained our human resources to fight against this pandemic and we made full use of tech for testing and tracking,” he said.

Modi said India has started the world’s largest coronavirus vaccination programme and its speed can be imagined from the fact that over 23 lakh health workers have been vaccinated in just 12 days.

Meanwhile, the external affairs ministry said India will supply 1 crore doses of the Covid vaccine to African nations. New Delhi is supplying the vaccine both on commercial basis and as "gifts" (free of cost) to foreign nations. India is also supplying the vaccine to a few nations on a commercial basis that includes Canada. India will also supply 10 lakh doses of the vaccine to UN health workers.

MEA spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said, “From January 20, we gifted over 55 lakh doses to our neighbours and in our extended neighbourhood — Bhutan (1.5 lakh), Maldives (1 lakh), Nepal (10 lakh), Bangl-adesh (20 lakh), Myanmar (15 lakh), Mauritius (1 lakh), Seychelles (50,000), Sri Lanka (5 lakh) and Bahrain (1 lakh).  These supplies are based on requests from these countries.