Adar Poonawalla, the CEO of SII (Serum Institute of India) – the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, says it will take around four to five years to produce enough COVID-19 vaccines to inoculate everyone in the world, as per news reports this week. Poonawalla’s remarks came a day after Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan’s claim that the coronavirus vaccine would be ready by early next year.

“Even if a vaccine were ready by early next year, as India’s Health Minister, Harsh Vardan, predicted in his remarks, there won’t be enough doses to vaccinate the entire global population until 2024,” said Poonawalla, estimating that the feat would require 15 billion doses for a two-doses-per-person vaccine. He added that pharmaceutical manufacturers currently did not have the production capacity to come close to meeting this demand.

The Pune-based pharma firm has partnered with five international pharmaceutical firms, including AstraZeneca and Novavax, to develop a Covid-19 vaccine and committed to producing one billion doses, of which it has pledged half to India. No other vaccine manufacturers have made a similar pledge. SII could also partner with Russia’s Gamaleya Research Institute to manufacture the Sputnik vaccine. SII has set a ceiling price of $3 per dose. The vaccine will be made available to the 92 countries. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will provide $150 million of “at-risk” funds to help SII accelerate the production of the vaccines being developed by the University of Oxford-AstraZeneca and Novavax, as per news reports.

Last week, human trials of the Oxford vaccine candidate by AstraZeneca were halted after a volunteer fell sick in the UK, following which the SII also paused the trials as it was issued a show-cause notice by the Drug Controller of India. The trials, however, have resumed in Britain. After the human trials of the Oxford vaccine resumed in the UK late last week, Poonawala had tweeted, “As I’d mentioned earlier, we should not jump to conclusions until the trials are fully concluded. The recent chain of events are a clear example why we should not bias the process and should respect the process till the end.”