brand logo

Covid-19 vaccine: Pvt. sector lobbying to import 

21 Mar 2021

  • Too early to permit pvt. sector to import: Govt. 

  • Permit private sector to import vaccines: PHIs 

  The private sector is lobbying with the Government to permit them to bring down Covid-19 vaccines with price regulation in order to maintain an uninterrupted supply in the local market and to thereby expedite the vaccination process.  Nevertheless, the Government has stated that it’s too early to allow the private sector to bring down vaccines considering the shortage of production as well as the prices.  Speaking to The Sunday Morning, the State Minister of Primary Health Care, Epidemics, and Covid Disease Control Dr. Sudarshani Fernandopulle stressed that none of the government task force meetings held so far to discuss the Covid-19-related matters have discussed giving permission to the private sector to bring down Covid-19 vaccines.  “It’s too early to permit the private sector to bring down the vaccine because vaccine production is limited and if we permit it and they purchase it from the black market, the prices would go up drastically,” she stressed.  As of now, the Government will hold the responsibility of bringing down the vaccine, the State Minister said, adding that in the future, the Government will consider permitting the private sector to get involved with the vaccination process.  However, the Public Health Inspector's Union (PHIU) last week urged the Government to let the private sector import the Covid-19 vaccine.  PHIU President Upul Rohana said that more patients have been reported from apparel factories and other factories; therefore, they need to be inoculated as the next step of the vaccination drive.  “If the Government is not capable enough to provide or import the number of doses needed to vaccinate factory workers, they can always permit the private sector to import doses with the permission of the National Medicine Regulatory Authority (NMRA),” Rohana added.  He also noted that these vaccines can be imported by the private sector under the guarantee of inoculating the masses alongside the programme of the Ministry of Health and the Epidemiology Unit.  “The Government would have to give the relevant permissions to the private sector to import doses under the approval of the NMRA if the vaccine coverage within Sri Lanka needs to be increased,” he said.  In January, Principal Advisor to the President Lalith Weeratunga, who heads the Presidential Task Force on Covid-19 Vaccination Plan and National Development, said that the private sector in Sri Lanka will not be authorised to import or sell the Covid-19 vaccine.  The importation and distribution of Covid-19 vaccines will be conducted completely by the Government. According to Weeratunga, since the vaccines are being brought to the country under emergency circumstances, the acquiring of vaccine doses will be conducted through government intervention.  However, in the future, the private sector will also be authorised to bring down Covid-19 vaccines to Sri Lanka, Weeratunga added.  Nevertheless, several Asian countries including Pakistan and Myanmar have recently allowed the private sectors in their respective nations to import the Covid-19 vaccinations.  Pakistan is one of the first countries to allow the private sector to import and sell Covid-19 vaccines. It has also exempted them from price caps, which have raised concerns about access inequality. Experts say this move could lead to disparity under an already fragile healthcare system and expensive private healthcare facilities.  Meanwhile, the Indonesian Government has approved a controversial new scheme that will allow cashed-up private companies in the developing Southeast Asian nation to pay to independently inoculate their staff from Covid-19 and avoid the long wait for public vaccination.  In neighbouring India too, stakeholders from the private sector have reached out to the union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan amid the Indian Government's decision to conduct the Covid-19 inoculation programme under a public-private partnership model.  The representatives have said the US had begun vaccination from 10 December 2020 whereas India started it on 16 January 2021. India did the first seven million doses in 26 days while the US took 27 days. Thereafter, the US has averaged more than one million per day whereas India is doing less than 0.3 million per day, the private sector has argued, according to senior officials in the Health Ministry. There has been hesitancy among healthcare workers and frontline workers for vaccination, which has slowed down the pace, it is reported.  The vaccines are promising over 75% of success rate; however, the total understanding about the side effects of the vaccine was yet to be found by scientists, as they are concerned that this kind of early deployment could compromise the ongoing clinical trials that seek to show conclusively how well the vaccines work.  Three vaccine research and development groups — BioNTech and Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford — have released promising preliminary data about their Covid-19 vaccine candidates. So far, all of these candidates have been safe in trials, and prevented Covid-19 in anywhere between 70% and 95% of trial subjects. Moderna and AstraZeneca plan on submitting their data to regulators for emergency use authorisation imminently; Pfizer and BioNTech already have.  As per the statistics available, more than 815,000 people have been vaccinated as of now in Sri Lanka and it received the first batch of Covid-19 vaccines from the COVAX facility last week.  According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the delivery of 264,000 doses is part of the first wave of arrivals that will continue in the coming weeks and months; culminating in 1,440,000 doses arriving through May and the additional doses to cover 20% of Sri Lanka’s population will arrive in the second half of 2021.  All these doses are donor-funded and provided at no cost to Sri Lanka.  Meanwhile, it is reported that China is awaiting clearance from Sri Lanka to give 600,000 coronavirus vaccines but the NMRA is yet to approve the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine.


More News..