Thanks. Did managed to find some details as well. Should be officially open in summer and will be used for the vaccine updates. Hope to be able to make enough for the whole country in a 4-6 month time frame. Not really clear if we can make them completely on these shores though.
Yep, they're maybe 12/18 months ahead of where they were expecting in terms of their own facility.
Making a (high volume) vaccine completely is more or less an impossibility these days. The equipment, the chemical reagents and precursors are just too specialised for every country to have all of the facilities - even if they could store the basic chemicals indefinitely.
The US and China probably get closest, though they of course rely on ingredients that are not available locally.
India has massive vaccine production capacity, but are currently limited on how much vaccine they can produce by the US export block. That doesn't just stop complete vaccines leaving the US, it also stops some reagents and basic manufacturing kit (like the disposable bioreactor bags and certain kids of plastic tubing) being exported.
Even things like glass vials, syringes and bottle caps have been production bottle necks, as the supply chains get overwhelmed.
I've read that the simplest vaccines to produce (in terms of the equipment and the number of basic chemicals involved) are actually the mRNAs - though I don't know enough to know if that's true
. But the handling side (fragile chemicals that require special handling and a tricky cold chain) means that you need to have the right factory.