CEO Of SpiceJet's Health Arm Says Open Up Vaccination To Private Sector

India is suffering the world's worst Covid-19 outbreak and its health care system is collapsing as it runs short of everything from hospital beds to oxygen cylinders

Avani Singh, the chief executive officer of SpiceHealth and daughter of SpiceJet Ltd. Chairman Ajay Singh, has called upon India's government to open up the manufacture and procurement of vaccines to the private sector, saying it's the only way to ensure the nation's vast population receives adequate protection from the pandemic. "The government needs to become much more lenient in opening up vaccination to the private sector," Ms Singh said in an interview last week. "We are obviously moving at a much slower pace with vaccinations than we should be. If they let private players like labs and hospitals procure vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and let private players make Covaxin more aggressively we could significantly ramp up the administration and build up enough immunity to get out of this faster. Not allowing labs and hospitals to procure and facilitate vaccines is a huge untapped potential." India is suffering the world's worst Covid-19 outbreak and its health care system is collapsing as it runs short of everything from hospital beds to oxygen cylinders. Although the South Asian nation is one of the world's biggest vaccine makers, supply locally has run dry amid an expansion of access to everyone aged 18 and above. To date, India's public health care operators have done nearly all the heavy lifting in treating Covid patients. When fatigue started setting in among workers at state-run hospitals, Mumbai, one of the country's largest and most-populated cities, invoked a colonial era law to rope in private-sector doctors. Vaccine purchases were also fully controlled by the federal government when only people aged 45 and above were eligible.