The Vaccine Warrior

As Bharat Biotech's Covaxin shows an interim efficacy of 81 percent, Forbes India traces the career of its founder Krishna Ella—a farmer’s son—whose entrepreneurial journey has seen a successful track record of developing vaccines in India for the world

- DIVYA J SHEKAR & MANU BALACHANDRAN

For a few months recently, Krishna Ella had been in the eye of a storm. It all started in early January, when India gave restricted emergency approval for his company’s indigenously developed Covid-19 vaccine, Covaxin, as part of the countrywide vaccine rollout plan. At that time, Covaxin was still in the midst of its phase 3 trials involving over 26,000 people, and no data regarding its efficacy had been published.

Covaxin, manufactured by Ella’s 25-year-old company Bharat Biotech, was developed using a whole-virion inactivated vero cell, according to the company. That means, the vaccine was made of dead coronaviruses, which when administered, allowed immune cells to recognise the dead virus, prompting the immune response against it.

While the phase 1 and 2 clinical trials conducted on 755 participants demonstrated a high safety profile of the vaccine with seroconversion rates of 98.3 percent and 81.1 percent on day 56 and 104, respectively, questions still loomed over the efficacy of the vaccine in controlling the spread of the virus.

The concerns were further accentuated when Adar Poonawalla, whose company Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s largest manufacturer of vaccines and the maker of the Covishield vaccine— the Indian version of the popular Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine— claimed that only three vaccines in the world had passed all the scientific evaluations with others only “safe like water”. Poonawalla’s statement came immediately after the government approved Covishield and Covaxin for emergency use.