(2021-04-13) Indias Covid Crisis Has A Familiar Culprit

India's COVID-19 Crisis Has a Familiar Culprit. Hospital beds are running short and so are vaccine doses. Although the government has halted all vaccine exports, many states have only a few days’ supply left in stock.

Even when new and virulent strains of the virus began to emerge, some of them from India’s own hinterland, officials showed no increased urgency about rolling out vaccinations. Regulators approved the first Indian vaccines in December. The first shot wasn’t given until more than two weeks later.

regulators pushed out an indigenously developed vaccine, Bharat Biotech Ltd.’s Covaxin, even before Phase III trial data was available. Meanwhile, other vaccines that had received regulatory approval elsewhere — including those from Pfizer Inc. and Johnson & Johnson — were unnecessarily held up until trials could be conducted in India.

As for populism, the government sought to squeeze the private sector using price controls. Vaccine manufacturer Serum Institute of India was forbidden to produce for India’s private market

Yet, far from investing in capacity or brokering deals to tap unused vaccine manufacturing facilities, as the Biden administration has done in the U.S., the Indian government been slow even to sign purchasing contracts with manufacturers

This kind of regulatory uncertainty, bullying, lack of foresight and urgency, and contempt for legitimate profit-making is familiar to every entrepreneur in India.