New Delhi: When world war against COVID 19 begins, HMD (Hindustan Syringes & Medical Devices) will be one of the most dependable suppliers of auto disable syringes. Millions of its injections would be weapons of mass vaccination against raging COVID. The Indian medical device leader has already shipped 56 million 0.5 ml Kojak AD Syringes to COVAX. As UNCEF calls mass COVID vaccination a historic undertaking, HMD’s moment of creating history has arrived.
UNICEF is aiming at creating as stockpile of a billion syringes as the world will need as many syringes as doses of vaccine. HMD has got an order of 140 million of pieces from UN agency. In addition to this, the company is swamped by order queries from different countries. As vaccines are nearing license for use, HMD is in overdrive. The company is expecting a windfall of order from Indian governments’ stockpile for COVID vaccination.
As India gets ready for COVID-19 vaccine, the Govt. should be well equipped with secured stock of syringes in advance as being done by UN bodies to administer a vaccine when it is approved and ready. At least 60 to 70% of 1.3 Billion people in India and 7.8 Billion people Worldwide will need syringes for Covid-19 vaccine.
“We have shipped 56 million 0.5ml Kojak AD Syringes to COVAX against our 140 million pcs order from UNICEF in September in addition to our monthly shipments of AD Syringes for routine immunisation worldwide “ stated Mr Rajiv Nath, Mg Director of Hindustan Syringes & Medical Devices Ltd (HMD)
HMD is one of the largest suppliers to UN Agencies like UNICEF, UNOPS for Auto Disable Syringes for immunization and is also the first Company in India to manufacture Auto Disable Syringes for Curative Segment.
Mr Nath further said, ‘ In the last few days demand has come forward from other countries like Japan and US for disposable syringes and Indonesia for auto disposable syringes as the countries start to stockpile in anticipation of Covid vaccine. HMD has planned to scale up its production capacity to one billion of 0.5 ML by middle of 2021 from 700 million AD Syringes a year as a commitment to produce millions of immunisation AD syringes for the global COVID-19 vaccination reinforcing the company’s vision to contribute to better healthcare in the country and internationally in areas of injection safety, patients safety, affordable access and stand with the country to fight the deadly virus.
HMD is certainly privileged to be part of this unprecedented mass vaccination in the world and is justifiably proud of its part. “Vaccinating the world against COVID-19 will be one of the largest mass undertakings in human history, and we will need to move as quickly as the vaccines can be produced,” said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF Executive Director.
“In order to move fast later, we must move fast now. By the end of the year, we will already have over half a billion syringes pre-positioned where they can be deployed quickly and cost effectively. That’s enough syringes to wrap around the world one and a half times.” She adds.
In line with the longstanding collaboration between the two partners, the global vaccine alliance Gavi, will reimburse UNICEF for the cost of syringes and safety boxes, which will then be used for the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access Facility (COVAX Facility) and for other Gavi-funded immunization programmes, if needed
As the key procurement coordinator for Gavi, UNICEF is already the largest single vaccine buyer in the world, procuring more than 2 billion doses of vaccines annually for routine immunization and outbreak response on behalf of nearly 100 countries. Every year,
UNICEF provides vaccines for almost half of the world’s children and procures and supplies around 600-800 million syringes for regular immunization programmes.
COVID-19 vaccines will likely treble or quadruple that number, depending on the number that are ultimately produced and secured by UNICEF.
