BE ensured equity, affordability while developing Covid vaccine: Mahima Datla

Hyderabad: Covid outbreak was an unprecedented situation and when Biological E was called to act upon it and develop a vaccine, the focus was on making the vaccine effective, safe, and affordable as health budgets were severely constrained in many countries. Speaking at a panel discussion on the first day of BioAsia titled ‘Two years […]

Hyderabad: Covid outbreak was an unprecedented situation and when Biological E was called to act upon it and develop a vaccine, the focus was on making the vaccine effective, safe, and affordable as health budgets were severely constrained in many countries.

Speaking at a panel discussion on the first day of BioAsia titled ‘Two years into the pandemic – Challenges, successes and what next?’, Mahima Datla, MD, Biological E, said, “We chose the vaccine platform that we did which is the recombinant subunit – of course because a lot of our experience with Hepatitis B vaccine with several hundred million of doses supplied, both individually and in the form of a pentavalent and the large-scale infrastructure that supports it.”

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“But I also felt that by and large we could down select the clones and engineered clones whether it was for this or another variant quickly once the manufacturing system was set. Did it give the speed of mRNA technology? No, but it gave us the scale and the give us the opportunity to deploy this in a manner that makes it extremely affordable,” she added.

Over supply may be true for some countries but not majority of the countries. Very few countries have been able to go down to immunising children. India must consider how to bring equity for rest of the world.

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