The Vial: SII CEO Adar Poonawalla on making Covidshied: 'It was a sense of responsibility of lives & livelihoods'

2020 & 2021 were two of the toughest years in the history of mankind as coronavirus had created havoc across the globe with its effects and fatality rate. To fight the virus, PM Narendra Modi announced the complete lockdown in the country on 24th March 2020.

In this tough phase, the country was simultaneously battling it out with virus and doing intensive research to make the vaccine. In Pune’s National Institute of Virology, Dr Priya Abraham and her team were taking efforts to separate the virus from humans, which was the first step towards making the vaccine.

Talking about it, Dr Priya said in History TV18’s documentary, The Vial, “We knew, what we really needed to have under our belt was the capacity to isolate this virus in vitro, in the laboratory because then we could grow up the virus. Virus would be available for making diagnostic tools and could technically be also available for the future vaccine.

Serum Institute of India, which is the largest vaccine manufacturing company in the world started working on the vaccine. Talking about it CEO Adar Poonawalla said, “It was very evident that a company a like Serum Institue, which was always producing vaccines to cover more than 50 per cent of the globe, should start developing a vaccine.”

Serum Institute collaborated with Oxford University and AstraZeneca to start the procedure of making the vaccine. After a long process and hard work of scientists and NIV workers, India became the fifth country to isolate the virus after China, USA, Thailand and Japan.

Around that time Serum Institute successfully made a vaccine, which can defeat the virus and it was named covidshield. “It wasn’t just a financial risk, more than that it was a sense of responsibility of lives and livelihoods,” said Poonawalla after vaccines were ready.

The gripping documentary, which is narrated by Manoj Bajpayee, premiered tonight at 8 pm.

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