India becomes one of the top countries to have secured the highest doses of Covid-19 vaccines, revealed Duke University’s global health innovation centre.

India has secured 1.6 billion doses of the Covid-19 vaccines on November 30, followed by the European Union with 1.58 billion doses and the US with nearly 1.01 billion doses.

The Duke University’s health centre has been mapping Covid-19 vaccine pre-purchase deals across the world under the ‘Launch and Scale Speedometer’ project.

The centre is backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

As per a Credit Suisse estimate, India needs about 1.7 billion Covid-19 vaccine doses to immunize majority of its adult population against the deadly virus that has infected over 9.57 million people in the country so far.

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The disease has claimed 1,39,227 lives in the country.

India has reportedly managed to procure one million doses of Novavax vaccine and 10 million doses of Gamaleya Research Institute’s Sputnik-V.

The country will also be sealing a deal with Oxford-AstraZeneca for half a billion doses of its vaccine.

However, none of these vaccines has been approved for use.

Confirmed purchases of the country cover 7.1 billion doses, with another 2.6 billion doses currently under negotiation or reserved as optional expansions of existing deals.

As per available data, the high-income countries have procured a confirmed 3.8 billion doses of the vaccines, upper-middle-income countries have 829 million doses and lower-middle-income nations have more than 1.7 billion doses

Since the middle-income countries have limited purchasing power, they are using other strategies to negotiate market deals for the vaccines.

Countries with manufacturing capacity have successfully negotiated large advance market commitments with leading vaccine candidates as part of the manufacturing agreements, a Duke University source revealed.

“We developed a data framework of relevant variables and conducted desk research of publicly available information to identify Covid-19 vaccine candidates and status, deals and ongoing negotiations for procurement and manufacturing of the vaccines,” a report quoted a Duke University’s health centre source as saying.

The centre is also studying the Covid-19 burden of countries and their vaccine allocation and distribution plans.