Hindustan Syringes shuts plant owing to pollution, triggers shortage scare

"We have been asked to shut down our needles and syringes plants in Faridabad along with the factories of several other companies," HMD Managing Director Rajiv Nath told news agency IANS.

IANS

December 11, 2021 / 19:12 IST

Representative image. Source: AFP

The closure of needles and syringes manufacturing factories located in Haryana's Faridabad, adjoining Delhi, as a part of controlling emissions in the NCR will impact healthcare delivery across the country in general and the Covid-19 vaccination programme in particular, said a top official of Hindustan Syringes and Medical Devices Ltd (HMD).

"We have been asked to shut down our needles and syringes plants in Faridabad along with the factories of several other companies," HMD Managing Director Rajiv Nath told IANS.

"We daily produce 1.5 crore needles and 80 lakh syringes. This has come to a halt now. As we can't feed needles beyond two days buffer stock from Monday, other factories fed by the mother unit will be shut and daily 1.2 crore syringes will not be available nationally," he said.

According to him, syringes are already running short in India and globally and the government has put in export restrictions.

The expectation was that the export restriction will be lifted by December end as peak demand ebbed post Diwali, he added.

COVID-19 Vaccine

Frequently Asked Questions

How does a vaccine work?

A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine.

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There are broadly four types of vaccine — one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine.

What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind?

Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time.

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