New Delhi: Bharat Biotech on Saturday said it would provide its COVID-19 vaccine, Covaxin, at Rs 1,200 for private players and Rs 600 for States.
The prices announced by the Hyderabad-based company is higher than that of Serum Institute's Covishield, which is the most used vaccine in India. The price of Covishield became a controversy recently after reports said that it is sold at a much lower price in rest of the world.
In a statement, Bharat Biotech Chairman and Managing Director Krishna M Ella said the company is supplying the vaccine to the central government at Rs 150 per dosage and the government on its part is distributing it free of cost.
"We would like to state that more than 50 per cent of our capacities have been reserved for central government supplies," Ella said.
Recovering the cost is essential in the journey of innovation towards other vaccines such as intranasal Covid-19,Chikungunya, Zika, Cholera and others, he added.
Earlier in the day, Serum Institute defended pricing Covishield vaccine at 1.5 times the initial rate, saying the earlier price was based on advance funding and now it has to invest in scaling up and expanding capacity to produce more shots.
The world's largest vaccine maker, which manufactures Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine at Pune, earlier this week announced a price of Rs 600 per dose for private hospitals and Rs 400 per dose for state governments and for any new contract by the central government.
It currently charges the central government Rs 150 per dose for the existing supplies.
The opposition parties had criticised the differential pricing for COVID-19 vaccines, saying it was discriminatory and will benefit only a "few big industrialists" while common people will suffer.
