Zydus to roll out its vaccine by end of September

Zydus Cadila, the Ahmedabad-based company whose coronavirus vaccine was granted emergency approval for use in India on Friday, has said that it expects to begin the supply of the shots by mid-to-end September and is aiming to increase production capacity by October.

The Zydus shot is the world’s first DNA-based vaccine against coronavirus disease (Covid-19) to be approved for use within a population. The three-shot vaccine is also the first to be cleared for use in children aged 12 and above and is the sixth addition to India’s arsenal in the fight against the pandemic.

The company plans to scale up production to 10 million doses a month by October after it presses a new manufacturing plant into action, said managing director Dr Sharvil Patel. They did not elaborate on the location or details about the new plant.

The current production capacity at their existing Ahmedabad plant wasn’t immediately known, but officials said they were readying a stockpile of three to five million doses in the next few days.

“We were producing vaccines at a very small scale; now our new plant has been commissioned. We expect for the vaccine supply to start from mid-September or end-September. We expect to reach the target of 1 crore doses in October,” said Dr Patel at a digital press briefing on Saturday.

The latest timeline given by the company means the vaccine maker will miss the deadline of supplying 50 million doses by the end of the year. The central government told the Supreme Court in June that 1.35 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines will be made available in the country between August and December this year. This included 50 million doses of Zydus’s ZyCoV-D shot, and 300 million doses of BiologicalE’s jab that is still under trial.

Patel said on Saturday that there will be a delay of 45 days and that the firm will reach the 50-million target by January. He added that the delivery delay is because of a delay in commissioning the company’s new plant as the second wave of Covid-19 infections prevented the travel of experts from other countries. The managing director also said that two to three other manufacturers have expressed interest in producing the vaccine, but such a technology transfer can take another three to four months.

Since the country’s drive began in January, daily vaccinations have been patchy, but are now on the rise.

A record 8.8 million shots were administered on August 16, the highest one-day figure for the country so far. The seven-day average for daily shots is presently below the peak capacity reached in the past, but has been rising in recent days. About 6.1 million daily doses were given on average in the last seven days, against a crescendo of 6.3 million daily doses for the week ended June 26, data shows.

The Union government has set a target of vaccinating India’s entire adult population by December 31. Till now, nearly half of India’s adult population has received one shot of the vaccine. Another half is still to go.

Additionally, Patel said there is no clarity on the price of the Zydus shot to be made available but hinted that it may not be very different from the other jabs currently available. “We are yet to have a discussion with the government on procurement; our understanding is that just like the other vaccines a major proportion will go to the government programme. The pricing will depend on the number of doses purchased and the applicator used, however, there isn’t likely to be a huge difference in cost as compared to the other available vaccines,” said Dr Patel.

The mainstays of India’s inoculation drive -- Covishield (Oxford-Astrazeneca) and Covaxin (Bharat Biotech) are provided to the government for ₹215 and ₹225, respectively. Private hospitals can charge people up to ₹780 for Covishield, ₹1,410 for Covaxin.

The approval by the Central Drugs Standards Control Organisation (CDSCO) to ZyCoV-D was given based on interim results of its Phase 3 trial data. The company says its vaccine has proven an efficacy of 66.6%, and is potent against the more transmissible and infectious Delta variant of the virus as the study was conducted during the second wave of the pandemic. “All the breakthrough infections investigated by us show that the infection was caused by the Delta variant,” said Patel.

The company, however, will still take four to six months to publish its phase-3 data as the trial hasn’t been completed yet, Patel added.

ZyCoV-D is now the sixth vaccine approved in India for emergency use after Serum Institute of India’s Covishield, Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin, Russian-made Sputnik V, and the American vaccines — Moderna and Johnson and Johnson (J&J).

The vaccine is the only one approved for use in adolescents in India as its phase-3 trial included the age group. But around 145.4 million people between the ages of 12 and 18 in the country will be eligible to get the jab only after a final nod by the government’s expert committees on vaccination, a government official told HT earlier this week.

There are two vaccine candidates which have been tested among children in India: Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin and Zydus Cadila’s ZyCoV-D, both indigenous.(Covaxin trial data for children is yet to be released).

Apart from the world’s first vaccine based on a plasmid DNA platform, the shot is administered needle-free using an intra-dermal jet. This painless administration, the company said, is an added benefit for children and those afraid of the needle.