Adar Poonawalla recounts the challenges in producing India's first COVID vaccine

Adar Poonawalla, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Serum Institute of India, makers of Covishield, one of main vaccines used in the vaccination programme said they were able to produce vaccines at this scale ahead of time and more than anyone else because of the risks they took during the beginning of the pandemic.
He said it was a time of huge uncertainty when nobody knew what vaccines would work, which technologies would work.

"So, we bet on three or four different candidates Novavax, the Oxford- AstraZeneca, and some others in 2020,' he said at the Times Network's India Economic Conclave 2022 on Friday.

He said building the capacity, buying the raw materials, flying down engineers, when there were no flights available, were not easy at that point in time.

He said he raised more than 10,000 crores between their capital and outside capital.

Poonawalla said he went to philanthropists like Bill Gates, for raising capital in advance.

He said he even looked at diluting a stake in Serum from private equity to raise the capital but they didn't need to do it because they went to other countries and philanthropists instead who understood the urgent need of doing it.

He said some of the vaccine manufacturers coudn't scale up enough as they chose wrong technologies.

"Messenger RNA vaccines were also an option for us. But it was an unproven technology at that time. No vaccine on Earth was ever developed using messenger RNA vaccines. I don't know about the future, but the main deterrent for me was storing it in minus seven to minus 20 degrees. A country like India and then to supply to even the African continent was a no brainer that we just couldn't do that. So these were the kinds of things we had to decide how to scale it up and make it affordable," he said, stating on how the planned during the pandemic.

"We just had to put our best foot forward. Of course, the option for someone in my position could just sit there doing nothing, wait for a year, look at what works and then try and partner but then the downside would have been that we would have probably been last in the race or one of the last players. I didn't want to have any regrets. And so we committed and said we have to succeed. One way or another," he said.

More than 90% of the Indian population has received Covishield.

He said he never faced a lack of support from the government.

"It was the speed of decisions that were necessary. We must give credit to Prime Minister Modi here. We all understood as a country how severe this virus is going to disrupt and shut down economies globally and even have impacts to our lives and livelihoods in India. It was his leadership that got everyone together, to work, collaborate and cooperate together," he said.

He said everything moved at a "super speed" from logistics, to vaccination rollout, to production.

He also praised the government's Maitri programme, where India helped other countries by exporting its vaccines. He said the government did whatever it could to keep the situation under control when the second wave hit the country and things were done in a record time.

"That's when we took out all the stops, create oxygen, hospital infrastructure, so many things that were done by the government in record time, given the scale of our population, so we must always remember that and our healthcare workers, we trained and had so many healthcare workers who sacrificed themselves in the line of duty, we should never forget that otherwise, all this would have been for nothing. So getting all that mobilized coordinated, so many mobile hospitals and other vaccination centers that were created. No country was able to do this at this scale. At our peak, we were vaccinating seven, 8 million people a day, on average. We even went to 10 million a day," he said.