India, it seems, would acquire around 216 crore doses of Covid vaccines between August and December this year. This impressive estimate is based on data that the Government had acquired from the manufacturers of eight separate vaccines. But almost immediately, there were questions on the number being inflated by overt optimism. Both Bharat Biotech and Serum Institute of India are yet to complete their existing orders with the Indian Government. To meet the updated orders, a massive upgrade in production capabilities would be required. Others pointed towards the listing of vaccines that are still in their testing phases and are unlikely to be available that soon like Bharat Biotech's intranasal vaccine. Officials from the Covid Task Force have stated that India will most likely have three billion or 300 crore doses by the early first quarter of next year. This, even accounting for wastage and such, could well be enough to inoculate a significant portion of the Indian population. Of course, this is if things go as ideally planned. India's vaccination campaign has recently taken a significant beating as the Government's hands-off approach to vaccine procurement was criticised by health experts and the Supreme Court. India, the country being relied upon to help vaccinate the world, was running into significant shortages to vaccinate its own population. Where was India's expansive capability to mass-produce generic medicines and vaccines? While many criticised the government's decision to first supply vaccines abroad before focusing on its own people, the answer is not quite so simple. In recent months, it has become apparent that everything relies on supply chains. India as a manufacturer of vaccines and medicines relies on global supply chains for the necessary raw materials at an affordable cost. But beyond that, there is a real global debate over whether our current system of manufacturing and supplying vaccines, as reliant as it is on a select few companies, is even capable of handling the level of production required to end this pandemic. There is no doubt that in an unprecedented crisis no nation or company can truly claim experience with vaccination campaigns of such scale. This is one of the reasons why India has supported expanding the manufacture of generic vaccines and medicines for COVID-19 by waiving intellectual property right protections. In a recent online event, Union Health Minister Nitin Gadkari reiterated India's support for such waivers. He stated that there was a need for a global policy that would allow pharma companies to manufacture vaccines and life-saving drugs by paying 10 per cent royalty to the original patent holder. This pragmatic suggestion comes at a time when a deadlock over vaccine IP waiver is growing at the WTO. India and South Africa's request for a waiver last year got its strongest supporter when US President Joe Biden indicated US support for the waiver recently. But on the other side, the EU is standing firm, led by Europe's pharmaceutical hub, Germany. Most EU leaders maintain that a waiver will not help solve the shortage of vaccines worldwide. Bill Gates, no stranger to controversy, recently dipped into even more controversy when he publicly opposed giving any kind of vaccine waiver for Indian manufacturers to produce western vaccines. His reason again related to the belief that this waiver would not help solve the supply issue but would certainly create issues for quality control and reliability of the vaccines being produced. There are, as many commentators have discussed, some reason to believe that the IP waiver is not a magic bullet for India and the world's vaccine shortages. For one, an IP waiver is not much to speak about if not accompanied by a transfer of technology. This is especially true for more advanced vaccine technologies like mRNA where the patent is not the only barrier to producing these new types of vaccines. Even if the patent holders were to be paid a portion of sales as royalty like Union Health Minister Nitin Gadkari suggested, there is simply no reason to believe they would accept such a deal. As commentators have explained, it's not actually a question of money. Most manufacturers don't see generic vaccines stealing away their profits to a significant enough extent to warrant alarm. It is, after all, not so easy to produce vaccines at scale. Resisting an IP waiver in all its forms comes down to the idea that vaccine makers cannot even give an inch in this debate or they risk establishing a precedent for future medical crises. Of course, the Indian Government's ambitious target of over two billion vaccines by year-end does not explicitly rely on any kind of IP waiver but it is hard to see how production could be expanded so rapidly without resorting to such drastic measures.