COVID-19 Vaccine: At 5,900 Syringes A Minute, This Indian Company Is One Of The World’s Largest Suppliers

New Delhi: Believe it or not, now that we have the COVID vaccine, there is a global scramble for syringes to inject them. Vaccines aren’t all that useful if health care professionals lack a way to inject them into people.

It may come as a pleasant surprise that an Indian company, based in Delhi NCR’s Faridabad, has been meeting this demand, churning out 5,900 syringes per minute!

Hindustan Syringes, one of the world’s largest syringe makers, has a long history of supplying UNICEF immunization programs in some of the poorest countries, where syringe reuse is common and one of the main sources of deadly infections, including HIV and hepatitis, News18 reported.

In late November, an urgent email popped up in the company’s inbox. It was from UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children, and it was desperately seeking syringes. Not just any would do. These syringes must be smaller than usual. They had to break if used a second time, to prevent spreading disease through accidental recycling. Most important, UNICEF needed them in vast quantities, the report added.

“I thought, ‘No issues, We could deliver it possibly faster than anybody else,” Rajiv Nath, the company’s managing director, was quoted as saying.

Nath added 500 workers to his production lines, which crank out more than 5,900 syringes per minute at factories spread over 11 acres in a dusty industrial district outside New Delhi. With Sundays and public holidays off, the company churns out nearly 2.5 billion a year, though it plans to scale up to 3 billion by July.

It was from UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children, and it was desperately seeking syringes. Not just any would do. These syringes must be smaller than usual. They had to break if used a second time, to prevent spreading disease through accidental recycling.

The United States is the world’s largest syringe supplier by sales, according to Fitch Solutions, a research firm. The United States and China are neck and neck in exports, with combined annual shipments worth $1.7 billion. While India is a small player globally, with only $32 million in exports in 2019, Nath of Hindustan Syringes sees a big opportunity.

In late December, when the World Health Organisation cleared Pfizer’s vaccine for emergency use, Robert Matthews, a UNICEF contract manager in Copenhagen, and his team needed to find a manufacturer that could produce millions of syringes. They were looking for a syringe that would meet WHO specifications and was compact for shipping. Hindustan Syringes fitted the bill.

The company is set to begin shipping 3.2 million of those syringes soon, UNICEF was quoted as saying, provided they clear another quality check.

Nath has sold 15 million syringes to the Japanese government, he said, and over 400 million to India for its COVID-19 inoculation drive, one of the largest in the world. More are in line, including UNICEF, for which he has offered to produce about 240 million more, and Brazil, the report quoted him as saying.