NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Friday issued notices to Union of India,Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare, State of Tamil Nadu, State of Himachal Pradesh, Pasteur Institute of India, BCG Vaccine Laboratory, Drug Controller General of India and two others on a writ petition averring that vaccine production facilites were closed in Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh.
A Bench comprising Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan and Justice P Sathasivam directed issuance of notices after briefly hearing the submissions of the counsel in this regard.
Petitioner S P Shukla, who is the retired Special Secretary, Family Welfare, Government of India and also a former Member of Planning Commission, averred that BCG Vaccine Laboratory, Chennai was the only institute under the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare to obtain ISO 9002 certification.
The public sector vaccine units of the Indian government manufactured vaccines for tetanus, diptheria, pertussis, measles, polio and tuberculosis. The Pasteur Institute of India (PII), Conoor was the first institute in India to produce antirables serum-vaccine therapy for human beings in 1917 and to improve it through many rounds of indigenous innovations.
Over the decades, it also produced oral polio vaccine, the DTP group of vaccines and more recently DTP-hepatitis- B comination vaccine apart from developing costeffecitve Japanese encephalitis vaccine.
The Central Research Institute, Kasauli, in Himachal Pradesh, is the only institute in South Asia that produced the yellow fever vaccine.
It was also the first laboratory in the world to produce anti-rabies vaccine.
The institute produces DTP vaccines, vaccines against yellow fever, typhoid, diptheria, tetanus, rabies, snake venoms etc.
The suspension of production in these three institutes in the public sector undermines a century old effort of building vaccine self-sufficiency and self-reliance. The closure happened at a time when the production in these PSUs was peaking and the vaccine demand-supply gaps were narrowing down and when there has been no complaint on the quality of the vaccines produced. As a result, India’s health security and bio-security especially of children, stand threatened, the petitioner felt.
The vaccines produced by these units cost only Rs 30.
Now that they are not available, the private sector is threatening to increase the prices of the vaccines they supplied to the government.
Compared to these cheap vaccines, expensive combination vaccines which are considered unnecessary by experts are flooding the market.
And the agents are actively lobbying with the officials in the Health Ministry for adoption under the Universal Immunization programme at a huge cost to the public exchequer.
Given the fact that 25 million children are born annually in the country,huge profits can accrue to private companies who manage to get contracts worth hundreds of crores to sell their vaccines to government, Shukla added.
It was on January 15, 2008 that the production licenses of these three institutes were cancelled and they were ordered to suspend production by the then Drug Controller General of India, for reasons of non-compliance with Good Manufacturing Practices norms under the Indian Drugs and Cosmetics Act of 1945, the petitioner pointed out and sought re-starting of production in these units.