Health Ministry admits to receiving no funds from PM CARES for COVID-19 vaccine development
A recent reply from the Union government to an RTI query has revealed that despite promising so, the PM CARES fund has not released Rs 100 crore from its kitty for the development of vaccines against COVID-19. Also, just about 13 per cent of the Rs 900 crore allocated to Mission COVID Suraksha for vaccine development has been disbursed.
Turns out it was all bluster. A promise of Rs 100 crore has come to nought. It was on May 13, 2020, when the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic was gradually reaching its peak, that the Narendra Modi government released a press statement through the Prime Minister’s Office.
It said that the government will provide Rs 3,100 crore to help the country’s fight against COVID-19., adding: “To support the COVID-19 vaccine designers and developers, an amount of Rs 100 crore will be given from PM CARES Fund as a helping hand to catalyse vaccine development, which will be utilised under the supervision of Principal Scientific Advisor.”
After almost two years of that statement, the promise has been belied. In response to a Right to Information (RTI) application by transparency activist Commodore Lokesh Batra (retd.), the Union Health Ministry said: “So far, as information from [Health and Public Education] Division is concerned, it is stated that no funds have been received from PM CARES Fund for vaccine development.”
Getting the reply was not easy, though. The RTI application had been filed on July 16 last year, more than a year after the statement on the research funding and at the peak of the second wave. The reply came nearly four months later, after Commodore Batra had filed multiple reminders with various authorities.
Batra told The Wire that he had sent seven reminders to the first appellate authority plus an “urgent” email to the Health Ministry’s nodal CPIO to intervene, before receiving the updates that he did.
As part of the updates, he was informed that not only were no funds from PM CARES spent on COVID-19 vaccine development, but also that just about 13 per cent (Rs 115.2 crore) of the Rs 900 crore allocated to ‘Mission COVID Suraksha – The Indian COVID-19 Vaccine Development Mission’ was spent for the purpose. A further Rs 78.96 lakh was given to Faridabad-based Translational Health Science and Technology Institute for supportive R&D (research and development).
The Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC), a wing of the DBT, disclosed these to Batra, along with the detailed spending of the Rs 115.2 crore fund. It was disbursed as follows: Rs 40 crore to Cadila Healthcare Ltd, Rs 23.73 crore to Bharat Biotech (developer of Covaxin), Rs 22.50 crore each to Biological E Ltd and Gennova Biopharmaceuticals Ltd, and Rs 6.47 crore to Genique Lifesciences.
Mission COVID Suraksha was launched on November 29, 2020 to back indigenous vaccine development, through the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), which is administered by the Ministry of Science and Technology.
The PM CARES Fund was created on March 27, 2020, following the pandemic in the country, with the hallowed aims of “strengthening the fight against COVID-19”, furthering the “availability of quality treatment” and encouraging “research on ways to beat Coronavirus”, as stated on the home page of its dedicated portal.
Towards the above-mentioned ends, the fund asks “people from all walks of life” to contribute to it so that “together” we can “solve challenges of the present and protect the future”.
The PM CARES Fund (grandly expanded as Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund) turned out to be anything but ‘caring’ when it came to allotting funds for the extremely crucial research undertaken in the search for vaccines against COVID-19.
