![]() But it wasn’t long before Poonawalla got his second chance. Poonawalla later admitted the fire set back production two to three months.īy early May, the Serum Institute had delivered about 30 million doses to the COVAX facility-less than 3% of the promised number. SII initially claimed this wouldn’t affect COVID-19 vaccine production, but afterward, it struggled to produce more than 60 million doses a month. Officials said the fire, which killed five workers, was caused by an electrical short circuit. 21, 2021, a blaze broke out during construction at one of the company’s plants in Pune. But almost straight out of the gate, SII stumbled. Poonawalla’s second bet was that he could rapidly scale up production to more than 100 million doses a month and ship most of them overseas. Vaccines produced by SII also became integral to India’s immunization campaign, which kick-started in mid-January. In February 2021, Ghana received the first COVAX shipment of 600,000 doses of vaccines produced by SII, followed by other countries including Liberia and Ivory Coast. in late December 2020 and by India in early January 2021, SII had some 50 million doses in cold storage. By the time the vaccine was authorized for use by the U.K. By selling advance orders to countries including Bangladesh and Morocco, SII secured $250 million more. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invested an additional $300 million. His family sank $250 million into the venture. The first gamble, in March 2020, was to leverage his relationships to strike a deal to manufacture the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine for low- and middle-income countries. By early 2020, SII was producing 1.5 billion doses per year, boasting that 65% of the world’s children had received at least one of its vaccines. The low-cost, high-volume business model-combined with SII’s long-standing partnership with GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance-made the company vital to childhood immunization campaigns around the world, especially in poorer countries. Producing such vaccines was still necessary, but not particularly lucrative. His business model was to buck the trend in the global pharmaceutical industry, which had stopped producing routine vaccines for many infectious diseases that had been quelled in the West. Two decades ago, the Serum Institute supplied vaccines to 35 countries. Adar had a reputation for an extravagant lifestyle, but in the background he was expanding his company’s reach. Cyrus Poonawalla had been nicknamed the Vaccine King of India for his work supplying vaccines to poor communities. When Poonawalla took over as CEO of SII from his father in 2011, he had big shoes to fill. Its meningococcal and meningitis shot sells for less than $1, compared with more than $100 for a meningococcal vaccine in the U.S. The Omicron variant may have resulted from the relatively low vaccination rate-26%-in South Africa, where it was first detected.īefore the pandemic, SII was little known, even in India, though it was praised for its steady work making cheap vaccines to fight childhood diseases. That’s a problem for the entire world after all, it’s likely that new variants of SARS-CoV-2-the virus that causes COVID-19-will continue to emerge in places where it’s able to spread unchecked. and the E.U., have prioritized their own populations-administering booster shots widely while fewer than 3.5% of people in low-income countries have received their first vaccine dose. But it’s also the case that wealthy parts of the world, like the U.S. SII’s stumble in 2021 is one reason for the woefully unequal global distribution of vaccines. “They thought that they could be the savior of the world.”Īnd even as Poonawalla tries to redeem his company by making good on his promises one year late, he is encountering new problems that could diminish his attempts to put the Serum Institute at the forefront of the global COVID-19 vaccine supply. “The hype clearly didn’t match the reality on the ground,” says Neeta Sanghi, a consultant in pharmaceutical supply chains. ![]() Critics say Poonawalla could have taken some of these issues into account earlier. But the company failed to deliver after encountering problems that included a fire at its manufacturing facility, a ban on vaccine exports and global supply-chain disruptions.
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