Bharat Biotech starts dispatching its vaccine against Covid-19

Bharat Biotech has started distributing its Covid-19 vaccine Covaxin to nine states via the Indian government and to 16 states via the concerned state governments.

On Wednesday, Suchitra Ella the co-founder and joint managing director of the company took to twitter and said that they have dispatched the vaccines through the Indian government to states like Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Delhi, Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Telangana  from June 8 to 14.

At the same time, the vaccine maker of Hyderabad also dispatched vaccines to 16 states. These states include Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Haryana, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Tripura, Uttarakhand and West Bengal.

She also added in the tweet that in the same span of time, the doses of the vaccine was also supplied to private hospitals across 27 cities throughout the country.

Those cities are Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore and Hyderabad. In this category, seven cities in Telangana and Andhra shall receive the vaccine.

But, she didn’t the mention the number of doses that were dispatched under these three categories.

Suchitra Ella tweeted, “Our mission is to deliver Covaxin to your towns, cities and states. Pls register and vaccinate @ govt or pvt hospitals near you.”

On Monday the company has fixed the indifference in pricing status for the central as well as state governments and also the private sectors.

It is of the opinion that the rate of Covaxin (Rs 150 per dose) to the Indian government is totally a non-competitive price and not sustainable in the future days. In a statement it recorded that for that reason a much higher price is required.

The high price of the vaccine for the private sector is basically because of the fundamental business reason, starting from low procurement values, high distribution costs to retail margins.

Covaxin is deemed to be the third costly vaccine worldwide with prices set at Rs 1,200 per dose for private hospitals.

Bharat Biotech has priced the vaccine at Rs 600 per dose for the state governments but later on, it was reduced to Rs 400.