Prefer Dealing With Centre Directly Instead Of States, Private Players For Covid-19 Jabs: Pfizer, Moderna

Global drug majors such as Moderna and Pfizer have reiterated that they will be dealing only with the central government on the issue of supplying their Covid-19 vaccine doses.

Accordingly, Moderna has also turned down the Captain Amarinder Singh-led Punjab government’s request for direct delivery of its vaccine to the state. The company has also stressed that it does not have additional supplies till the end of this year.

Similarly, Pfizer has also maintained a similar stand as it is also negotiating with the centre with regards to specific exemptions and safeguards that include the waiver of the all-important indemnity clause as well.

With the decentralization of the vaccination drive, quite a few state governments resorted to publishing global tenders to procure the doses from international firms.

Punjab itself pursued the direct purchase of several vaccines such as the Johnson and Johnson’s Janssen, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and even Russia’s Sputnik V.

However, it received a response only from Moderna that straight up refused to deal with the state government, Economic Times reports.

Moreover, many vaccine manufacturers are already dealing with capacity constraints and this perhaps explains their decision to only negotiate with central governments across the world.