India, a country with’Vaccine King’, will supply more than 2.5 billion doses of corona vaccine this year

This is a report from major media around the world evaluating India’s ability to produce coronavirus vaccines. India supplied 60% of the vaccines vaccinated worldwide last year. India is already positioned as the’world’s vaccine factory’. This ability is now being used to defeat the coronavirus and save humanity from the pandemic.

Among Indian vaccine companies, it is the Indian Serum Research Institute (SII). It sounds like the name of the institute, but it is a private company. It is not a publicly traded company, but a privately owned vaccine manufacturer. As CEO Dar Funawala said in an interview with the Associated Press, the annual production capacity of SII is expected to reach 2.5 billion doses this year. The vaccine production volume is the world’s largest single company. SII is emerging as a savior to save the global vaccine market that has fallen into a’supply crisis’ based on its tremendous production capacity.

SII is currently commissioned to produce a vaccine publicly developed by Swedish and British multinational pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and Oxford University. The AstraZeneca vaccine for supply to India and developing countries around the world will be produced by SII. In addition, from June this year, the US pharmaceutical company NovaVax is planning to produce a vaccine under development. It is unusual for one company to manufacture two types of coronavirus vaccines at the same time. This is evidence that it is recognized in production capacity and quality control.
The AstraZeneca vaccine produced by SII was not only vaccinated in India on January 16, but also in neighboring countries such as Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Maldives, and Seychelles, which India provided free vaccines in late January. 20 million batches were supplied. On January 27, just before the military coup on February 1, Myanmar, which bordered the border, was given 1.5 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine free of charge.

The AstraZeneca vaccine produced by SII is scheduled to be provisionally supplied to North Korea in the first half of this year through Cobax Facility (Cobax for short), an international vaccine joint purchase program. Said in North Korea is one of 92 low-income countries that are the target of the COVAX AMC (COVAX AMC), a program that supplies vaccines to developing countries with funds from developed countries.

The AstraZeneca vaccine accounted for the majority of 366 million doses in the supply of Kovacs in the first half. 1.2 million doses of Pfizer vaccines, which are in different supply, are expected to be supplied in the first quarter. KOVAX’s provisional plan does not include advanced countries such as the United States, Europe, and Japan and China. Korea is expected to receive more than 2.56,800 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine produced by SK Bioscience in Korea and more than 117,000 doses of Pfizer vaccine.

COVAX is a coronavirus vaccine led by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Global Vaccine Immunization Association (GAVI), which aims to promote vaccination in poor countries, and the Infectious Disease Prevention and Innovation Alliance (CEPI), which fund vaccine development. It is a joint purchase and distribution project. COVAX aims to supply 2 billion doses of coronavirus vaccines to developed and developing countries within this year. The leaders of seven major countries (G7), who held a video conference on February 16, agreed to provide $7.5 billion to Kovacs. Of this, $4 billion was decided by the United States. The support for Cobax serves as a signal for the return of the United States to the international community when President Joe Biden took office.

Providing 40 million clinical trials, commissioned production rights

So how did SII take over the consignment production of the AstraZeneca vaccine? Was it that AstraZeneca came to see the tremendous production capacity and commissioned the consignment production? Astonishingly looking at SII’s homepage, the Indian company’developed’ the vaccine together with AstraZeneca and Oxford University. He said he contributed through the joint process of developing ChAdOX1, the scientific name for AstraZeneca vaccine.
Let’s look at the story. According to reports from the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the SII threw the number of matches last April. AstraZeneca agreed to support and invest in the development of ChAdOX1, a novel coronavirus vaccine candidate that was jointly developed by Oxford University. It is now a’vaccine’ that has been completed with phase 3 clinical trials and received urgent approval for use by WHO on December 30th in the UK, India the next day, and on February 15th. However, at the time, it was only one of the vaccine candidates, and its safety and efficacy were unknown. It was in a state of unknown success. The biotechnology of this vaccine, which causes an immune response by inoculating the human body with the genetic information of the novel coronavirus, which causes a mild cold, was different from the general vaccine manufacturing technology.
But the company’s founder, Chairman Ciders Funawala, believed in the power of science and technology. He made a bold investment. He is the chairman of SII’s holding company, Ciders Funawala Group. SII’s CEO Adar Funawala is his son.

Chairman Funawala decided to support clinical trials by producing 40 million batches of this candidate substance by September 2020. Candidate substances must be produced and placed in glass bottles before they can be injected into humans for clinical trials. It is a tremendous investment that costs 120 million dollars at the current vaccine price of $3 per dose. Considering the initial production equipment and quality inspection investments, the actual investment may be more.
According to Forbes, Funawala’s personal fortune is $11.5 billion, but such a drastic investment is not easy. This is because if a vaccine development fails, it is not only easy to return to companies and individuals. The fall of trust between companies and entrepreneurs is also a problem.
But Funawala decided to invest and support boldly. As a result, the technological prowess of Oxford University and AstraZeneca’s business sense and SII’s production capacity created a synergy and served as the driving force behind the vaccine development. SII has secured the consignment production rights of the vaccine to India and developing countries through bold joint investment at risk. AstraZeneca did not give SII a huge opportunity for consignment production of a coronavirus vaccine.

Chairman Funawala is revered in India as a self-made entrepreneur who is called the’Vacin King’. Born in 1941 in Pune, a large city in Maharashtra, in central India, to a’parsi’ family of horses. Farsi means Persians.In India, it refers to the Zoroastrians and their descendants who migrated to preserve their faith when the Sassanid Persian Empire (224-651) collapsed by Islamic forces in the 7th century C.E. and the Islamization of the Iranian plateau began. The parsi who settled in India were assimilated into India in terms of language and clothing, but they maintained their religious identity and operated a separate community. Because of this, it is a relatively free group from India’s unique caste system, Hindu-Muslim-Sikh religious confrontation, and nationalism. It is an evaluation that it has actively embraced Western culture and cooperated well with foreigners.
The husband of Prime Minister Indara Gandhi (1917-84), journalist and politician Feroz Gandhi (1942–60), the founder of the Tata group, Jamsetji Tata (1839-1904), and the world-famous rockstein group’Queen ‘Lee Freddie Mercury (as a child, name Faroque Bulsara, 1946-91), and Perosesha Mekhta (1845-1915), co-founder of the National Assembly, an Indian independence movement group and political party, are parsed.

Some of the parsi use’walla’ as their castle in the area where they live, which means funawala is from Puna. In fact, the old name of Pune, the home of President Punawala, is Puna. His name, Cyrus, is the English version of Cyrus the Great, who first named the country of Persia (formerly Mediah) after the founding of the Achaemenid dynasty in the 6th century BC. Persia (Persia), recorded in the Old Testament books of Ezra, Isaiah, and Daniel, which destroyed the New Babylonian kingdom, liberated the Jews who were brought to Babylon at that time, and returned them to their hometown, and supported the Jews to build the Second Temple in Jerusalem. King Cyrus’ is that.

According to India TV News, Funawala’s father ran a horse farm as a breeder to raise horses for horse racing. Funawala, who studied commerce at the University of Pune, decided to find another job because horse racing had no future in socialist countries such as India. He decided it was wiser to make products for the majority than for the elite. So, at first, he sold horses to a pharmaceutical company that made vaccines out of serum and soon jumped into the vaccine business on his own. Horses were widely used for the production of antisera, developed by the German physiologist Emil Bering, a 1901 Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine. Antisera is a serum containing a specific antibody against a specific antigen (Serum: a liquid component that removes white blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets from the blood) and is used in immunotherapy.
Funawala established a private company called the Indian Serum Research Institute (SII) in 1966, and after two years of research and development, it produced a serum to treat tetanus, and soon released a tetanus prevention vaccine.
Has developed into the world’s largest vaccine maker on a current dose basis. He received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University in the UK in 2019. According to Forbes, Funawala’s fortune reached $11.5 billion as of October 2020.

According to the SII website, the company is the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer in terms of production and global sales. It produces 1.5 billion doses of vaccine per year. It is worth paying attention to the quantity of 1.5 billion batches. Based on this production capacity and know-how, SII has the foundation to supply large quantities of coronavirus vaccines around the world.
Vaccines produced by this company include polio, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, hepatitis, BCG, Haemophilus B virus, and measles vaccine. The company estimates that 65% of children worldwide have been vaccinated at least once with its own vaccine. The vaccines manufactured by the company are recognized by the World Health Organization and are exported to 170 countries around the world. SII prides itself on saving millions of lives around the world so far as vaccines it manufactures have been vaccinated through individual national vaccine programs.

At the time of its founding, India lacked both technology and economic power. In India at the time, vaccines were more of a luxury than a necessity. This is because the supply was in short supply. Imports were expensive and difficult for the general public to access.
He developed a variety of vaccines, produced them in large quantities, and supplied them to the Indian market at reasonable prices. The first thing I touched is the antitoxin that cures tetanus. It was developed and put on the market two years after it was founded. Tetanus is a disease that occurs when tetanus bacteria in soil or animal feces enter the human body through the skin and produce toxins, causing nerve abnormalities, causing respiratory paralysis or muscle spasms. It is commonly infected by animal bites, insect stings, and skin damage from contaminated nails or tools. Even more frightening is neonatal tetanus, which occurs when the umbilical cord is cut with a poorly sanitized tool immediately after childbirth. This disease is a major disease that increases infant mortality in developing countries with mortality rates exceeding 90%.
In 1974, it developed a DPT (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus) vaccine, which is essential for children. It is one of the essential vaccinations for newborns. In 1984, it developed a snake venom antisera to treat snake bites. In 1989, a measles vaccine was developed and sold to medical institutions under the brand name M-Vac. It also released the polio vaccine and the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine, another essential vaccine for children. The hepatitis B vaccine has saved the lives and health of thousands of third-world residents.

Thanks to SII’s vaccine development and supply, India was able to achieve vaccine self-sufficiency in the 1980s. This allowed more people, especially infants, to save lives from vaccination. India’s health environment has improved dramatically. A representative health indicator that shows this well is the life expectancy at the time of birth (statistical analysis of how old you can live = life expectancy).
According to the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)’World Population Prospects’, India’s life expectancy was 44.84 years old in 1966, when Funawala founded SII. After that, in the 10-year cycle, it was 51.25 years old in 1976 and 55.98 years old in 1986. In 1996, it was 60.53 years old, over 60 for the first time. It reached 64.72 in 2006 and 68.67 in 2016. It is expected to reach 69.96 years old in 2021 this year, and is expected to reach 70.19 years old over 70 for the first time in 2022. Life expectancy affects various factors such as food, food safety, hygiene, and medical care. The increase in life expectancy is the result of numerous economic and social factors, but among them, the role of vaccine supply, which significantly lowered the infant mortality rate, cannot be ignored.

During the same period, the infant mortality rate also fell significantly. The infant mortality rate is the ratio of the number of infants who died within one year of birth divided by all newborns born that year, and is usually expressed as death out of 1000. According to U.S. data company Knoema, the infant mortality rate in India was 148.36 in 1966, but fell to double digits for the first time from 125.64 in 1976 to 99.15 in 1985. It decreased to 96.70 in 1986, 74.50 in 1996, and 53.50 in 2006. It was 33.78 in 2016 and 29.02 in 2020. As of 2017, it is higher than Korea’s 2.7 or the OECD average of 3.9, but it is true that it has fallen significantly over the past 50 years. In this process, the achievements of the vaccine developed and supplied by SII are bound to be significant.
SII has been certified for quality by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1994 and exported vaccines to the world. It also supplies vaccines to international organizations including the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the American Health Organization (PAHO).
Funawala wanted to save people in need of vaccines, especially children, from infectious diseases by producing life-saving immunity and bio products. That was the reason for the start-up. Having become one of India’s leading successful entrepreneurs, they have made tremendous investments at risk in developing a vaccine that saves humanity from coronavirus. As a result, it has established itself as the’corona vaccine king’ who controls the world’s coronavirus vaccine production.

His vaccine business can only be evaluated as practicing the’right thoughts, right words, and right actions’ emphasized by Zoroastrianism. In the movie’Bohemian Rhapsody’, which depicts the life of Freddie Mercury, lead vocalist of the British rock group’Queen’, the father of Zoroastrianism Mercury emphasized on his son going out in the evening.
This is the way of life of Zoroastrian believers. It means that Funawala’s chairman Zoroastrian spirit has been put into practice in business. Chairman Funawala, who founded SII, stands out for his clear business goals, faith in science, investment in R&D, bold challenge spirit, and a corporate spirit that pursues the global common good. There is a growing likelihood that he will become an economic champion in the post-corona era, who has to worry about coexistence and co-prosperity.

In-Taek Chae International Reporter [email protected]