India has become the largest buyer of confirmed vaccine doses with 1.6 billion as countries are securing vaccines to fight the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), which has already killed 1.5 million people across the world. world, a study by Duke University showed in the US India has so far registered more than 9.57 million cases and 139,188 people have died.
The European Union is in the second position with about 1.6 billion doses. Meanwhile, the United States, which continues to be the most affected country, has managed to acquire 1 billion doses of vaccines.
The study, ‘Speedometer Launch and Scale’, analyzed data through November 30 on vaccine procurement and manufacturing to track the procurement flow and better understand global equity challenges. The North Carolina-based university conducted research to identify Covid-19 vaccine candidates and status, ongoing procurement and manufacturing negotiations, virus burden in a country, along with allocation and distribution plans. “Countries with manufacturing capacity, such as India and Brazil, have managed to negotiate large market commitments in advance with the leading vaccine candidates as part of manufacturing agreements,” the study showed.
Japan, Canada and the United Kingdom have so far purchased less than 400 million doses of confirmed vaccines. Duke University noted that there will not be enough vaccines to cover the entire world population until 2023 or 2024. The study also revealed that high-income countries had 3.8 billion confirmed vaccine doses, middle-income countries 829 million doses, while low-income countries had more than 1.7 billion doses.
“Most high-income countries have been able to negotiate purchases by investing large amounts of public funds in Covid-19 vaccine research and development and have leveraged purchasing power to make large-scale deals on a portfolio of candidates. to vaccines, “he added. .
.
