Vodka, no patents: How cheapest jab was made

Texan Developers Of Biological E’s New Covid Shot, Corbevax, Have Focused On Ending Vaccine Apartheid

- Abhilash Gaur

We were promised vaccines “cheaper than a bottle of water” last year but, depending on who’s buying, a Covid shot now costs anywhere from the price of a small pizza to a meal-for-four. So, the news that India has pre-ordered 30 crore doses of a new vaccine for Rs 1,500 crore is comforting.

At Rs 50 a shot, Biological E’s Corbevax may not be “a bottle of water,” but it costs only half as much as a litre of petrol. And while the market price could be higher, TOI reported on Saturday it’s unlikely to be more than Rs 250 a shot, making it the cheapest vaccine by a fair margin.

Price, of course, depends on factors that economists study, but it is also a function of belief — is the main intent to profit, or serve? News reports and interviews of Corbevax’s developers over the past year show making money was never their goal. While mRNA and viral vector vaccines created a buzz, they focused on being quietly effective.

Fighting ‘people’s diseases’

Corbevax will be made at Hyderabad-based Biological E, but it was developed by Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine. The centre’s co-director Peter Hotez says they have spent 20 years making vaccines for the “neglected diseases of poverty” — diseases private firms don’t expect to profit from.

In 2011, they started a coronavirus vaccine programme to develop low-cost vaccines for diseases like SARS, which they thought posed a “pandemic threat”. It led to a vaccine called ‘CoV RBD219-N1’ that was never put to use. But when Covid turned into a pandemic last year, the old vaccine came in handy, as SARS and Covid are related viruses.