Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya on Tuesday said the government has approved the Ankleshwar manufacturing facility in Gujarat for production of Bharat Biotech's COVID-19 vaccine Covaxin. The approval to this facility will increase vaccine availability and accelerate India's vaccination programme against COVID-19, Mandaviya said in a tweet.
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In May this year, Bharat Biotech had announced that it will ramp up production of Covaxin by manufacturing additional 200 million doses at Ankleshwar facility of its wholly-owned subsidiary Chiron Behring Vaccines. The additional production will take the company's total manufacturing capacity to 1 billion doses per annum, the pharma company had said. "The company plans to produce 200 million doses of Covaxin per annum in the GMP facilities that are already operational for the production of vaccines based on Inactivated Vero Cell Platform Technology, under stringent levels of GMP and biosafety," Bharat Biotech had said. While the country's drug regulator has granted emergency use authorisation to five COVID-19 vaccines so far, Covaxin and Serum Institute of India's Covishield are the most used vaccines in the country's nationwide vaccination programme. India has so far administered 51.45 crore vaccine doses as part of the COVID-19 vaccination programme.
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