Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who left for the United States on Wednesday to attend the Quad summit, said international travel should be made easier through “mutual recognition of vaccine certificates”.

PM Modi, in his video remarks at the Global Covid Summit hosted by US President Joe Biden, also said India is ramping up production capacity of existing vaccines and the supply chains of raw materials must be kept open.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has been an unprecedented disruption. It is not yet over. Much of the world is still to be vaccinated. That is why this initiative by President Biden is timely, and welcome… We also need to focus on addressing the pandemic’s economic effects. To that end, international travel should be made easier through mutual recognition of vaccine certificates,” PM Modi had said.

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“India is now running the world’s largest vaccination campaign. Recently, we vaccinated about 25 million people on a single day. Our grassroots-level healthcare system has delivered over 800 million vaccine doses so far. Over 200 million Indians are now fully vaccinated. This has been enabled through the use of our innovative digital platform called Co-Win. In the spirit of sharing, India has made Co-Win, and many other digital solutions, available freely and open source software,” he added.

However, with India looking to resume export of COVID-19 vaccines to poorer nations, the prime minister said, “supply chains of raw materials must be kept open”.

“As newer Indian vaccines get developed, we are also ramping up production capacity of existing vaccines. As our production increases, we will be able to resume vaccine supplies to others, too. For this, the supply chains of raw materials must be kept open. With our Quad partners, we are leveraging India’s manufacturing in producing vaccines for the India-Pacific region,” he added.

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Earlier, the World Health Organisation (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had thanked India for resuming its vaccine shipments to other countries.

In a tweet, the WHO chief said, “Thank you Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya for announcing India will resume crucial COVID vaccine shipments to COVAX in Oct. This is an important development in support of reaching a 40 per cent vaccination target in all countries by the end of the year.”

Meanwhile, the UK government revised its travel policy to include Covishield as an approved vaccine. However, it says Indians double-vaccinated with the shot still have to quarantine, raising “vaccination certification issues”.

According to reports, the updated UK guidelines say, “Formulations of the four listed vaccines, such as AstraZeneca Covishield, AstraZeneca Vaxzevria and Modern Takeda, qualify as approved vaccines.”

Indians, who are vaccinated with two doses of Covishield, will still need to undergo quarantine. The implication is that the problem is not Covishield but doubts over vaccination certification in India.

On the other side, the Quad partnership is on track to produce at least a billion vaccine doses in India by 2022, US President Joe Biden said on Wednesday. The President also said that nothing is more urgent than working together to defeat COVID-19 so the world is much better prepared for future pandemics.