Cyrus Poonawalla on Infrastructure Building

Poonawalla founded the Serum Institute of India in 1966 and built it into the world's largest vaccine manufacturer by volume, supplying over 140 countries. Wikipedia notes the company produces more than 1.5 billion doses annually of vaccines for measles, polio and the flu. The scale of this single private company is what later enabled India to anchor the global COVID-19 vaccination response.

Inside Serum's sprawling Pune factory, NPR describes filled vaccine vials whizzing off conveyor belts at around 5,000 per minute. Scientists in goggles and gloves steered microscopes over a chimpanzee virus spiked with coronavirus protein. Human embryonic kidney cells fermented in floor-to-ceiling stainless steel vats imported from Europe that cost upward of $4 million each.

NPR records that by December 2020, when governments worldwide began granting emergency authorization, Serum already had hundreds of millions of doses ready to ship. The company promised half its production to the Indian government, which donated and sold supplies to about 70 countries. Serum was producing 60-70 million Oxford-AstraZeneca doses — branded as COVISHIELD —.

NPR notes a January 2021 electrical fire at Serum's Pune complex killed five people, though vaccine production was not affected. The image of black smoke billowing from the complex where Indians' best hope for COVID salvation was being produced was frightening for a watching nation. The episode illustrates how, at peak scale, operational risk at a single facility can become a national-public-health concern.