Serum Institute halts Covishield vaccine production due to “lack of demand”

Adar Poonawalla, the chief executive officer of Serum Institute of India (SII), said on Thursday (October 20, 2022) that his company has stopped manufacturing Covid-19 vaccine Covishield since December last year due to lack of demand.

"There is hardly any demand for booster vaccines due to Covid-19 fatigue and lack of enthusiasm among the people for the jabs," Poonawalla told reporters on the sidelines of the Developing Countries Vaccine Manufacturers Network (DCVMN) annual general meeting in Pune.

He also said nearly 100 million doses of Covishield, which was the mainstay of India's Covid-19 vaccination campaign launched in January 2021, expired in December 2021 and were subsequently destroyed, reports our New Delhi correspondent.

Booster shots of Covishield have little demand right now as people are fed up of Covid-19 vaccines, Poonawalla said.

Covishield was produced by SII using a master seed from Oxford University and Swedish pharma firm AstraZeneca at the Indian company's Pune plant.

Given the sharp decline in the number of daily Covid-19 cases across India in the last few months, the central government had recently announced its decision not to procure any more Covid-19 vaccines and said it is surrendering Rs 4,237 crore of the 2022-23 budget allocation for the inoculation drive.

According to the health ministry of the Indian central government, a total 219.32 crore Covid-19 vaccine doses have been administered to beneficiaries across the country until recently.

Additional stocks are already lying with state governments while private hospitals can still procure directly from vaccine manufacturing companies. So, even if the government's stock gets exhausted, Covid-19 vaccines will still be available in the market, the health ministry had said in a statement.