 watching news click. And today we're gonna be talking about the latest in the vaccine situation across the world. As we know with vaccine distribution and the delivery of vaccines is highly unequal. Some countries of the global North, they've really vaccinated their populations that are very high rate, whereas many countries of the global South still struggling for supplies. And in between we have a situation where India is not able to get some of the essential raw materials needed to ramp up the production of vaccines. And US officials have said that this is right now, right now not the top priority that the top priority is going to be the US population. So to talk about these issues and more we have with us Praveer Prakash sir. Praveer, thank you so much for joining us. So my first question is regarding net prices statement the State Department spokesperson who said that, you know, right now their first priority is the American population. And this was in response to the question of whether India's requests for, you know, waiving the Defense Production Act allowing supplies to come to India would be accepted. So how do we see this response in the context of the global scenario? You see, it's also interesting that this response has come after first denying there is an export ban on intermediates or vital equipment that are basically required in the production process that filters, back filters of specific kinds and so on. So initially the United States had said there is no ban but what they did not say and that's the half of that statement is the problem. What they did not say was that they were privileging their own production which meant their companies had to get everything first and therefore others had to wait in line. So this is essentially, what shall I say? Whitewashing, something that they were doing or it is just pre-vacation, it's lying. You can take whatever you want out of it but certainly it was hypocritical to claim there is no export ban while not allowing exports to take place to other countries. So that is one part of it. So this statement at least has accepted that yes, we are privileging our own production and then goes on to also add certain, what shall I say? White lies, lies, whatever you want to call it by saying that US will protect its population first. That's what they've been saying right from the beginning that this is the aircraft issue, oxygen masks descend you fix yours then give others. Well, actually oxygen masks descend for everybody. It's not the descend only for the first class and then it comes to the second class or the club class, whatever you want to call it. So that apart, here the issue was that the second part of the statement that we privilege ourselves first, but they also said it's a huge boon to the rest of the world because the United States then will be able to control the virus within its own population. Therefore it will not spread virus or mutated viruses will not spread from the United States. But what about the rest 7.3 billion people outside the 7.4 billion people outside the United States? Do you think their viruses will not mutate there that it will not come back to the US? So the whole argument if US protect itself it will actually help to protect the world is completely bogus. And that comes out very sharply in the statement. So the reality is it's a completely hypocritical statement. In fact, if we look at the figures that I'm now seeing that the US would probably successfully vaccinate the people above 18 years by say June or so. So if that is so, then up to June they're not going to export any vaccines. Will they then allow at least intermediate goods to be exported raw materials to be exported, filters to be exported. So all those question marks remain but is the whole world 7 billion people, 7 plus billion people supposed to wait till the United States has vaccinated itself completely? And if new mutants arise, will the US itself be safe? So that is the question which the global health experts et cetera from the beginning either everybody is safe or nobody is safe. And I think that's a fundamental tenet of public health which has been broken here by saying we'll privilege US over the rest of the world. And I do know that in India also similar calls are now being given. But the whole point is of course we are in a huge crisis but that crisis is not going to be solved by hoarding vaccines for ourselves. I think that is something we have to understand but the basic issue is I think the US has set really the gold standard for selfishness in terms of vaccines or public health policies in the world at the moment because it's not only not giving vaccines to others but it is not even allowing others to manufacture or increase their manufacture. And I think that's a very, very damaging position for the whole world. Absolutely and this is of course in addition to the millions of doses of AstraZeneca vaccine which the US is not even sanctioned but is holding on to and refusing to export. Praveen in this context also wanted to ask you about the huge amount of hype that had happened recently when the Quad had met India, Japan, Australia and the United States leaders had met and they had talked about vaccine diplomacy. There was a plan in which India was supposed to play a very crucial role as the vaccine supplier and they were also supposed to work together. But right now we see that none of this is in the picture as the US has clearly said that we're not going to allow these materials to go the necessary materials to go to India unless all our needs are met first. So was that all just hype or was this not really predicted over? You know, India has the capacity to manufacture 120 million doses per month if raw materials and other things come probably that could be scaled up to something like 150, 160 million doses per month. If you take Serum Institute itself they said they can do 1.2 billion doses a year 100 billion doses per month and that if it's also orders are there they have investments coming then they can even ramp it up to 2 billion doses. So there have been various statements been made but if you look at what the capacity is then yes Serum Institute has always claimed that if it had got the money then it would have scaled it up to 100 billion doses much earlier but the restriction at the moment is not the money. Yes, money now the Modi government has given some money but the real restriction at the moment which Adarkunawala has said seems to be the constraint of raw materials and intermediaries that you intermediate goods that you require. So that is one part of it. The second part of the quarter miscalculation seems to have been that India had control its epidemic therefore a slow pace of vaccination in India with 60 billion, 70 billion doses till the US requirements are met. Don't forget we also have Bharat Bhaitek which has a certain capacity. So that pace was enough and India could supply some to rest of the world while vaccinating its own people. The bottom of that has been knocked out now by the huge spike that we are seeing and what people are calling a typhoon whatever you want, word you want to name but the real issue is that given the fact that we are still seeing a steeply rising curve of new infections. It's clear that we have not reached the peak of this wave so the flattening and even when flattening will take place it will take some time before it comes down. Given all of that, it is very clear that India is not in a position to provide vaccines to others for the time being unless it is able to step up production capacity considerably. And there of course, the Modi government without doing that, making grandiose plans to compete with China actually has knocked the bottom out of its own claims to be a competitor because China has controlled its pandemic and it is vaccinating people as well as exporting. That export and vaccinating its people simultaneously is possible because they have been able to control the pandemic. The Indian government actually believes its own propaganda that we have controlled the pandemic, pandemic is gone it's all over now. Therefore, a slow rate of vaccination along with export is possible and therefore the court statement that you refer to where India becomes the vaccine supplier Americans with a much bigger capacity to manufacture vaccines do not offer any vaccines. That is not for the rest of the world. That's for them, maybe for their allies but certainly not for the global South. The third world can survive on American not on American vaccines on Indian vaccines was the basic idea. And then the Japanese and Americans would give money Australia because it neither has money nor vaccine capacity would then provide the logistics was the argument. But the linchpin of that was Modi's belief Prime Minister Modi's belief that India has controlled the pandemic like China has and now can follow and compete with China 50% export, 50% for its people or 60, 40 whatever you want to have it and therefore India would be able to compete with China. The other part of it and this I think is the bigger tragedy for India is that we had a starting capacity which was larger than China's perhaps for vaccine production. I'm looking at the figures that are there globally. Of course, the World Health Organization never really procured vaccine from China or Russia. They procured vaccine really from either the Western companies or from India that has been their trajectory till now. And therefore we really do not know what the Chinese capacities are fully but there's no question. The China has the ability to ramp up production very rapidly and that is because of two things. All the intermediaries, other stuff that is required in production China seems to already produce. So because they are the manufacturer of the world as they are called. So they have that capacity to ramp up production quite rapidly. So they have made investments they have expanded their production they have licensed their vaccines to a number of internally number of companies and therefore the initially there were smaller companies unlike for instance, Sena Institute which has a big capacity one of the largest in the world probably the largest in the world. Therefore they have those companies which were relatively not as big but with investments, with support they could ramp up production and they don't have the kind of constraints that we seem to have. That is we need support materials from United States for our manufacturing itself. That was one issue. The second biggest and I think that has been a cardinal mistake that India should have actually tried to expand vaccine production and not decided that the market knows best the private players will do everything. All we have to do is to tell them you produce and that'll happen. And this is what Modi calls a self-reliant India. He calls it Atma Nirbhara because the minute you call it self-reliant it's max of Nehruvian socialism. So therefore the BJP is not fond of Nehruvian socialism or terms like self-reliance but the belief that private capital will solve all the problems and the market will take care of all the issues with a cardinal mistake when you come to public health and that's what comes up now that you needed money. These companies needed money. They needed technology. They need government support. The US has done that. The US understands capitalism very well. It knows that others should be talked about others should be taught free market but it comes to itself. It is always said state has to intervene in these kinds of issues. In fact it intervened in the polio vaccine manufacture very early. That was actually one of the test cases when the free market initially failed. And Aishwarya and his government then said we will procure and supply the vaccines and that's how polio vaccines were procured in the United States and that's how many years back this is in the 50s. So that cardinal lesson that public health doesn't work like this is more simply lost. And so you have a situation now that you have a constrained vaccine supply. You're not able to supply your own people and then you have to create even worse. You have declared laissez faire for the vaccines. Government will procure 50% the states and the private hospitals and the private market. The open market will knock at the vaccine manufacturers doors to get whatever scarce vaccine is left. The big, as I said, the issue was for instance your Bharat biotech which is manufacturing a vaccine which came out of the public sector. It came out of National Institute of Biology from the ICMR. Now why could not have that been licensed to another six, seven manufacturers both private and public. And there's seven public sector manufacturers in India who are hiding at the moment. And one of them, for instance, Haffkeen Pharmaceutical Unit is a very old one. It started with in the 20s, 30s a part of the Haffkeen Institute. It is still one of the largest suppliers of oral polio vaccine in India. Now, given all these capacities you had you didn't go that way. And there are another 10, 15 companies including major biologicals who all can manufacture vaccines. In fact, they are lining up to manufacture vaccines. For instance, Sputnik 5 or the Gamalaya Institute's vaccine. Now all of them have the ability to manufacture vaccines. Now why this should not have been expanded much earlier is something that I'm not able to understand particularly when we had the inactivated virus vaccine which is what was developed by National Institute of Biology. This is what actually Sinovac did. The public sector developed the vaccine gave it to a number of units to manufacture. And that's why they have been able to ramp up their manufacture. This is can Sinovac, Sinofarm, all of that. These are Chinese, basically public sector the driven vaccine manufacture, vaccine development which then gets farmed out to a number of smaller companies or bigger companies, whatever. So why that method wasn't followed is not clear. And we see the crisis today that even if we start investing in all that we are saying this will take three to six months before we can ramp up our vaccine manufacture. In the meanwhile, the US is putting has put its foot on the pipeline of intermediate goods that we require for vaccine manufacture. The Johnson and Johnson tie up and then you have a tie up of serum institute with Novavax and with, as well as of course AstraZeneca as we know both these vaccines are going to be constrained if these are not lifted. Absolutely, Praveen. So in this context finally just wanted to come back to a point you just earlier into that which is that there's not been too much procurement by the WHO of the Chinese and Russian vaccines. So is there any particular reason considering that across the world there is still a huge demand for vaccines? Of course China and Russia have exported considerable amounts but it has not really been under the WHO ban. Well, one thing is China has exported a significant amount. Russia relatively less but I think Russian capacity, production capacity is a lot less than India or China's or South Korea. South Korea is also a major manufacturer. So Russians are now targeting India and South Korean manufacturers to step up production. So Indian manufacturers I think were hesitant because government of India had not given emergency use earlier. Now they have given emergency use to also spot me quite. So I think now we are going to see India step up. South Korea also a bunch of manufacturers have got together to step up the vaccine production. But it's going to take time. This is not going to happen instantly. And in fact, that's the grouse I have against the Indian governments not putting in the extra effort to start manufacturing earlier. Both investment planning, looking at supply chain all of that and also funding. But when it comes to China, China is the only one which is able to continue vaccinating its people and expanding production as well as export. So India has virtually taken itself out of this race at the moment until we ramp up production to a level that we can actually vaccinate our own people plus export I think we have to see we will see that India's exports will take a knock. As you know, in the last two weeks we have seen actually drop in vaccination figures instead of rise. So already you can see we seem to have reached some kind of a bottleneck. Coming back to why WHO is doing this this has been an old issue while the Trump administration said WHO has been captured by China. The issue was really the opposite. It's really the Gates foundations and different kinds of foundations which are all US foundations they have been deeply entrenched in WHO. In fact, the Gates Foundation provides is one of the biggest funders of WHO itself. So apart from that, in this particular case the vaccine platform which is supposed to lead the COVAX part that you were talking about that is actually controlled by two foundations two organizations which are again both deeply, I will not say captured but deeply influenced by Gates and his money. Bill Gates and the Melinda Gates Foundation. So the Western influence on this has been quite significant. And the Chinese I think therefore didn't want to but their head against WHO they were they have done it on their own and they're having bilateral deals and doing it on their own. The Russians are keen to get into WHO they therefore they I think they are trying to see whether they can be approval can be given by WHO on their vaccine. The Chinese also probably at the moment have also asked WHO whether they are vaccinated qualify what are the things they would need to do. So the process is on but at the moment it doesn't look like WHO is moving very fast on this. I think they're very afraid that if they take any Chinese vaccine they will be again accused of being pro-China as we saw the attempt of the experts who came and said it's very unlikely there was any weaponized virus that came out of Wuhan or a leak from Wuhan and they gave various reasons why that is so but you could see the reaction and the WHO director general saying no, no, no all options all hypotheses are on the table. Of course everything is on the table the question was the experts claim about likelihood. So I think the WHO is scared of being again attacked on the China front and therefore they have been very, very quiet on Chinese vaccines. Whether the Russian vaccines will get through open question. If for instance the European regulatory organization accepts the Russian vaccine then I think WHO might follow suit but on their own will they do it is an open question but at the moment the long-term prospect for rest of the world is quite bleak. If you look at what are called the low income countries you will see they have hardly any vaccine manufactured Africa has none it's 1.3 billion people. Covax cannot supply them and the Covax supply was going to come from from the Salem Institute then what would they do? And that is something which would haunt the world because if they if we cannot address the pandemic across the globe then mutants will arise and this battle will be every year we'll have to battle a new mutant and a new pandemic version. I think that is the threat that we all carry and we can only see what condition India is and at the moment no oxygen is not available crematorium is not able to handle dead bodies and that's the hospital ICU beds are not there. So this is a repeated crisis of this nature is what the world will face if you're not able to vaccinate the people at one go at one time in one phase so that one particular new mutants don't arise and that's the risk that we are now carrying the new mutants are arising in different parts of the world and if we do not vaccinate all the people at the reasonable point of time then this cycle of new mutants and you know surge and vaccination will continue. Thank you so much for talking to us. That's all the time for you to keep watching news click.