A day after Serum Institute of India announced a Rs 100 per dose cut in Covishield prices for state governments, Bharat Biotech followed suit with a price reduction of Rs 200 per dose for Covaxin.
On Thursday, Bharat Biotech announced that it was cutting Covaxin prices from Rs 600 per dose to Rs 400 per dose for state governments. With this reduction, the price gap between Covaxin and Covishield for state governments is down to just Rs 100 per dose.
The prices for private hospitals, however, remain unchanged at Rs 1,200 per dose. The Hyderabad-based vaccine-maker had already said that it would stick to its original pricing of Rs 150 per dose for the Centre.
“Bharat Biotech is deeply concerned with the critical pandemic circumstances that India is facing at this time. Recognising the enormous challenges to the public health care system, we have made Covaxin available to state governments at a price of Rs 400 per dose,” the company said in its announcement.
“We wish to be transparent in our approach to pricing which was determined by internally funded product development, several operational-intensive BSL-3 manufacturing facilities (the first of its kind in the country) and clinical trials. We wish to champion ‘Innovation in India’ and our commitment to public health is absolute!” it added.
In its tweet on the price reduction, the company said: “With the greater part of the organisation’s facilities and resources being diverted to Covid-19 vaccines, we continue to work towards offering superior Covid-19 vaccines and sincerely wish that this gesture enables our country towards a faster recovery.”
While announcing the pricing of Covaxin on April 24, Bharat Biotech had said that Covaxin being an inactivated and highly purified vaccine, its manufacturing was expensive due to very low process yields. “Recovering costs is essential in the journey of innovation towards other vaccines such as intranasal Covid-19, Chikunguniya, Zika, Cholera and others. Our core mission for the last 25 years has been to provide affordable, yet world-class healthcare solutions for the globe,” it had said.
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