THE GREAT RACE

Any other summer, Adar Poonawalla wouldʼve been aboard a yacht on the French Riviera. But Covid-19 upended all plans, and the CEO of the worldʼs largest vaccine company finds himself in the thick of the action

- CHE KURRIEN

Few news stories today are being tracked with greater fervour across the globe than the race for a Covid-19 vaccine. And the privately held Serum Institute of India, the largest manufacturer of vaccines in the world by volume, is central to many of these conversations. On April 22, with the world reeling under lockdown gloom, the company’s 39-year-old CEO, Adar Poonawalla, announced an exciting partnership with Oxford University’s renowned Jenner Institute, which was about to start human clinical trials on its promising single-dose vaccine candidate; if all goes as planned, it would have approvals by September. Given the urgent need for a vaccine that’s available at mass scale, Poonawalla declared he would take the financial risk and manufacture millions of doses of the Oxford candidate ahead of approvals; when the approvals come in – which he is confident they will – he would be ready with abundant inventory that people could take immediately; if approvals don’t come through, he would take the financial hit on the useless stock.