The Keeper
‘Vaccinated prince’: Indian billionaire set to do Covid jabs for UK
Adar Poonawalla, head of the Serum Institute, has leased the Mayfair premises for £ 50,000 a weekCoronavirus – the latest updatesSee all our coronavirus coverage Adar Poonawalla, chief executive of the Serum Institute of India. Photo: Getty Images The AstraZeneca vaccine has made Professor Sarah Gilbert – led by the Oxford team that created it – one of the UK’s leading modern scientists and turned company Anglo-Swedish medicine to become a household name. But nearly half of the AstraZeneca scenes, which are expected to reach the arms of hundreds of millions of people around the world, are being captured by a 40-year-old Indian billionaire with a penchant for private jets and Picassos. Adar Poonawalla, a self-proclaimed “vaccination prince”, is the chief executive of the Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s largest vaccine producer, which even before a coronavirus outbreak produced more than 1.5 bn jabs a year for everything from polio and diphtheria to tetanus, BCG, hepatitis B and MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccines. Vaccines have made Poonawalla and his family extremely rich. They are now the sixth richest family in India with an estimated fortune of $ 15bn (£ 11bn), according to the Times of India. A woman walks past a picture welcoming a Covid-19 vaccine program with a picture of Poonawalla Birds. Photo: Ashish Vaishnav / SOPA Images / Rex / Shutterstock Properties include Lincoln House, the former Mumbai mansion in the US embassy for India. At $ 113m it was the most expensive Indian home ever sold when they bought it in 2015. Poonawalla, educated at £ 30,000-a-year at St Edmund’s School in Canterbury and Westminster University, signed a contract to rent the Mayfair Premises for £ 50,000 per week. The building, which stands at 2,3oo square meters (25,000 square feet) is 24 times the size of a typical English home, comes with an adjoining guest house and leads back to one of the “secret gardens” at Mayfair. He is leased from Polish billionaire Dominika Kulczyk, whom he bought for £ 57m last year. Poonawalla, who is married with two children, travels by helicopter and private jet. It has pictures by Picasso, Dalí, Rembrandt and Rubens, and has a collection of 35 rare luxury cars including several Ferraris, Bentleys and Rolls-Royces, as well as a Mercedes S350 converted to a Batmobile replica. Replica Poonawalla Bird Batmobile His personal website admits that his lifestyle looks flash. “Poonawalla Birds are easy to dismiss as a rich blanket… standing next to a racehorse,” he says. However, he says, “the flame is cultivated” and that he is in fact “a heavy young man trained by a difficult leader – the father of Cyrus Poonawala”. Poonawalla’s idea was not to make vaccines. His father, Cyrus, founded SII in 1966 as a sidekick to the 81-hectare (200-acre) Poonawalla Stud racing stables. (Serum from purified horse blood has been used to make early vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, and scarlet fever.) But it was Poonawalla who made his father “go big” on vaccines after an eye. citing Bill Gates’ 2015 speech, in which billionaire Microsoft co-founder-philanthropist warned that the world was not ready for a new viral pandemic. “I wanted to be prepared for an event at an open stage ever since I heard Bill Gates in Ted’s speech where he made it clear that we should be more concerned and prepared for such situations,” Poonawalla told him. the Hindustan Times. He doubled the company’s production facilities and began producing more vaccines for developing countries on behalf of the World Health Organization and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Vaccination (Gavi), the Gates-sponsored vaccination charity of which Poonawalla is a member. table. The title of “vaccinated prince” was introduced when Poonawalla was named chief SII official in 2011, replacing the father of the “king of vaccines”, who is now chairman of the wider Poonawalla Group, which including SII. Campus of the Serum Institute of India in Pune, where it manufactures Covid-19 vaccine. Photo: Punit Paranjpe / AFP / Getty Images When a coronavirus struck, Poonawalla had decided: “Do nothing at all and watch as it spreads, or take the risk and resist it. ”He took the risk. At the time the institute was working with Oxford University on the development of a new malaria vaccine, and their scientists called for collaboration on the Gilbert vaccine. In May last year, Poonawalla met with AstraZeneca chief executive Pascal Soriot on video call, and negotiated a deal for SII to make about 1bn doses over 12 months – nearly half the total. The same month the package reached a large SII campus in Pune, 150km southeast of Mumbai. Packed in dry ice was a vial containing the parts needed to form the Oxford vaccine, a cell substrate for growth and detailed instructions. The results of clinical trials or any regulatory agreement that the vaccine was effective or even safe were not included. A worker fills Covid-19 vaccine pills at the Serum Institute of India factory in Pune. Photo: Rafiq Maqbool / AP However, Poonawalla ordered three of its factories – which at the time were making “some very profitable [other] vaccines ”- to immediately convert the production to Oxford / AstraZeneca AZD1222 coronavirus vaccine. “No one wants a pandemic, but we were almost designed for one,” he told the Guardian earlier this year from his office inside a converted Airbus A320 jet, to it says as “sort of like Air Force One”. “We produce 1.5bn vaccine doses every year. We never thought the whole world would be up to us, but no one else has the ability to go up, ”he said. He said the decision to invest was easy because the company is a private business “and is not accountable to investors and bankers and shareholders”. Instead, he says, “it was just a quick five minute conversation between me and my dad. ”It was also, he admits,“ a big gamble – big, big, big. People said I was crazy or stupid to make such a big bet at the time. ” Airport staff load boxes of vaccines manufactured by the Serum Institute of India at Mumbai airport. Photo: Indranil Mukherjee / AFP / Getty Images By the time the vaccine received its first regulatory approval from the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in December 2020, SII had already produced 40m doses. (It was approved by the WHO in February, but has not yet been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).) The institute is now dispensing 80m doses per month, and they are aiming for doses of 100m per month soon, although a fire at one of its manufacturing facilities in January missed the target. Countries and governments, as you await the provision of #COVISHIELD, I humbly urge you to be patient, @SerumInstIndia has been led to prioritize the great needs of India and along with its that needs the balance of the rest of the world. We’re doing our best.— Poonawalla Bird (@adarpoonawalla) February 21, 2021 But SII’s big output is tossed and Poonawalla into the global political arena, as world leaders fight for doses and India – embracing its own rise in Covid cases – wants the country ‘s production lines to be handed over first. Last month, Poonawalla tweeted: “Countries and governments, as you await the provision of #COVISHIELD, I humbly urge you to be patient, @SerumInstIndia has been directed to prioritize to the great needs of India … We are trying our best. This week the Indian government introduced a two-to-three-month de facto ban on vaccine exports, which will have an impact in the UK, Europe and low-income countries. and intermediate on the WHO Covax scheme. Sign up for the Business Today daily email or follow Guardian Business on Twitter at @BusinessDesk Controls will delay 5m doses to be sent to the UK. The forthcoming shortage means that the UK vaccination program has been postponed for a month and vaccines will not be widely offered to people under 50 to 1 May. Back in India, Poonawalla is building another factory. The $ 400m facility, scheduled to open in 2024, is designed to deliver 1bn vaccine doses a year. It may be too late to help with the routine coronavirus vaccination campaign, but Poonawalla is now on the next pandemic. “Maybe not in my life, but at least in my children’s lives, there will be another global pandemic,” he told Bloomberg. “And I’m willing to promise anything that pandemics will be far worse than this.”