West ‘complacent’ on vaccines
Machines whirr, glass clinks and every 95 seconds a child's life is saved. The world's biggest vaccine-maker - the Serum Institute of India - is gearing up to dispatch 25 million doses of the new R21 malaria vaccine, developed by scientists at the University of Oxford, to Africa next month.
Three years ago, this same laboratory was churning out millions of Covid vaccinations. Now, at the rate of 400 doses a minute, it is waging war on malaria, a disease that kills 600,000 people a year.
Yet while much of the developing world is crying out for jabs, Adar Poonawalla, chief executive of the Serum Institute, believes the West has become blase about vaccination. “It's complacency,” he said, pointing to the British measles outbreak, the largest since the 1990s,
Whooping cough is also on the rise: on Thursday, the UK Health Security Agency warned of a new spike among infants after a “steady decline” in vaccination among babies and pregnant women.
“God forbid there’s a pandemic again,” said Poonawalla, noting the stagnation of Britain’s British vaccine-making industry despite the Covid experience – when India imposed an export ban in March 2021 to meet domestic demand, the UK was left scrambling.
Despite the huge success of the Covid vaccine rollout, uptake of routine childhood jabs is now lower in the UK than it was before the pandemic - and for some jabs, the lowest it has been for 15 years.
The Serum Institute, three hours from Mumbai, employs 8000 people and has
“God forbid there’s a pandemic again.”
Adar Poonawalla, chief executive of the Serum Institute
capacity to manufacture 3.5 billion doses a year of a range of vaccines, which it sells to 168 countries, including measles, tetanus, polio and a new low-cost HPV jab. Its new malaria jab will be rolled out in the next few weeks. Every year, roughly one in every 500 children in Africa under the age of five die from malaria. “We're really looking forward to being able to contribute to save a lot of lives,” said Poonawalla, 43. “In the coming years we can scale up to 100 million doses a year.”
Poonawalla took over the Serum Institute in 2011 from his father, Cyrus, 83, who founded the company in 1966. According to the Times of India, in 2021 the Poonawallas were the sixth- ichest family in India, with an estimated fortune of £11.8 billion (NZ$24b). This wealth, and private ownership of the Serum Institute, allows him to keep prices low. “We don't believe in a 1000% margin on a drug when we can make a modest margin and still be quite profitable.”
He points out that while Serum is the biggest manufacturer of vaccines by volume, its turnover of US$3.2b (NZ$5.2b) in 2022 was dwarfed by Pfizer's US$100b.
.Umesh Shaligram, chief scientist at the Serum Institute, believes a combination of vaccines will eventually eliminate malaria altogether. “Within 20 to 25 years, we hope to do it,” he said.