New Delhi: Of the eight billion vaccine doses manufactured and distributed across the world in the last one year alone, half of them were manufactured in India, said Union Health Secretary Punya Salila Srivastava.
She said this while addressing the annual India Leadership Summit 2024, organised by the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum here today.
Punya said India has emerged as a global leader in pharmaceuticals, being the third-largest producer and a key supplier of generic medicines.
This sector’s success has resulted in substantial savings for healthcare systems worldwide, including a notable contribution to the US healthcare system.
“The contribution of the Indian pharmaceutical industry is evidenced by the fact that India has the highest number of US FDA-approved pharmaceutical plants outside of the United States. This is 25 per cent of the total number of US FDA-approved pants outside of the US.
“The medicines from Indian companies, I am told, provided 219 billion USD savings to the US healthcare system in 2022 and a total 1.3 trillion USD savings between 2013 and 2022,” she stated.
The country also leads in vaccine production, with a significant share of global manufacturing, underscoring its role as the “pharmacy of the world”, she said.
The health secretary said 50 per cent of all vaccines manufactured in the world are from India.
“In the last one year alone, of the eight billion vaccine doses manufactured and distributed across the world, four billion doses were manufactured in India,” she said.
To ensure a robust healthcare system, she noted that India has reformed medical education, replacing outdated regulatory frameworks with the National Medical Commission Act and related laws. This has led to a significant increase in medical and nursing college numbers and enrolment, addressing disparities in healthcare professional availability, she said.
Consequently, India is poised to produce a competent health workforce that meets both national and global needs, she noted.
Punya emphasised that government efforts have progressively improved the quality, scale and cost-effectiveness of healthcare in India.
“It is a testament to our expanded healthcare services that the out-of-pocket expenditure (OOPE), which is borne entirely by the households, has declined by 25 percentage points as a share of total health expenditure between 2013-2014 and 2021-2022,” she said.
On the strong Indo-US Partnership in the health sector, the Union health secretary said, “Our mutual and shared priorities in the field of surveillance, pandemic preparedness and anti-microbial resistance are underscored in the deep partnership between National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and the US Centre for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC).”
“India appreciates the NCDC and ICMR Field Epidemiology Training Programs (FETP) organised in collaboration with the US CDC.”