Developing countries must fear for the success of their vaccination campaigns because India, one of the largest suppliers of the coronavirus vaccine, has tightened its export ban.

India itself has been badly hit by the pandemic and will therefore probably stop running vaccines until October.

Originally, their export should start again in June.

The export ban will predominantly affect people in Africa, where only 28 million out of 1.2 billion people have received an initial vaccination.

Christoph Hein

Business correspondent for South Asia / Pacific based in Singapore.

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    Winand von Petersdorff-Campen

    Business correspondent in Washington.

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      Meanwhile, the children's aid organization Unicef ​​called on the G-7 countries and the EU to donate an additional 150 million cans to poor countries.

      According to calculations by the British analysis company Airfinity, they could do so without revealing their own vaccination goals if they released 20 percent of their stored vaccines in June, July and August.

      Political pressure has now apparently had an effect in Washington after the United States was the only producer country to completely refuse exports for a long time.

      Two weeks ago, President Joe Biden allowed the export of 60 million doses of the Astra Zeneca vaccine, which is not approved in America and threatened to spoil in warehouses in Baltimore.

      Now he plans to donate an additional 20 million doses of the US-approved BioNtech, Johnson & Johnson and Moderna vaccines.

      Nobody donates more with it than the United States, Biden claimed.

      China exports more than America

      While China exported around 40 percent of its vaccine production volume, according to Airfinity's calculations, the United States did not even supply one percent to other countries.

      In addition, they made the export of raw materials more difficult and thus delayed the production in India of AstraZeneca and Novavax vaccines.

      The situation there is coming to a head: On Tuesday, Asia's third largest economy officially counted more than 25 million infected people.

      The real number could be ten times that.

      Also because of the increasing criticism of the government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, vaccinations in India should be ramped up as quickly as possible.

      So far, 183 million of the 1.4 billion people have been vaccinated at least once.

      The Rabobank analysts remain skeptical: "In the best case scenario, only 35 percent of Indians will be vaccinated by the end of the year," they said on Tuesday.

      So far, vaccines have been in short supply, especially in rural areas.

      But even in the hard-hit capital New Delhi, the vaccine for 18- to 44-year-olds is enough for a further three days, warns the city administration.

      In the course of its “vaccination diplomacy” based on China, the government had given or sold 66.4 million doses to a total of 90 countries by April - which the Indians Modi are offering today.

      The Ministry of Health justified the export, however, with the fact that India's weak infrastructure and lack of personnel did not allow the quantities produced to be vaccinated in their own country.

      Export freeze hits Covax campaign hard

      Now the U-turn: The export ban hits the multinational Covax vaccination campaign with its 172 member countries hard. She plans to distribute 2 billion vaccine doses by the end of the year. Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and large parts of Southeast Asia and Africa, among others, are dependent on the supplies of the vaccination alliance supported by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the vaccination alliance GAVI.

      This brings the most important manufacturer in the world, the private Serum Institute of India, into focus.

      The government has just banned the SII from delivering contractually agreed 5 million doses of the vaccine from Astra-Zeneca and Oxford University to the UK.

      Most importantly, the manufacturer has a contract with Covax to deliver 1.1 billion doses of the Astra-Zeneca and Novavax vaccines to the poor.

      By the end of May, the SII should have delivered 140 million units - which are now to be used within India.

      According to Unicef, the export ban will lead to a shortage of 190 million cans for Covax by the end of June.

      "Vaccine Apartheid"

      Against this background, the WHO appealed to the manufacturing countries to ramp up their production because the deliveries expected from India did not materialize.

      WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that the world had reached "vaccine apartheid" and urged rich countries to release more of their own vaccines to countries in need.

      On Monday, after the United States, China followed suit with India and South Africa in calling for the revocation of vaccine development patents.

      Germany, Switzerland and other countries with a strong pharmaceutical industry are against it.

      They argue that patents are not the bottleneck.