On march 5th 2020 Mumbai’s horseracing season culminated with the Poonawalla Breeders’ Multimillion, a day-long extravaganza dominated by India’s first family of the sport, the Poonawallas. Triumphs at the track were accompanied by news reports on the Bollywood lifestyles of Adar Poonawalla and his wife, Natasha, whom Elle magazine described as “India’s first lady of fabulousness”. Only cursory attention spilled over to the couple’s day job running Serum Institute of India, the press-shy vaccine-maker at the root of the family fortune.
A year on it is the company, not its flamboyant owners, that is making headlines. As the covid-19 vaccination drive encounters production glitches in Europe, hits distribution snags in America and faces a geopolitical scramble for supply everywhere, Serum Institute has emerged as the one firm apparently able to ramp up production fast and export the doses without courting controversy. By the end of the year, Mr Poonawalla says, it will add 1.5bn covid-19 shots to 1.3bn-1.5bn doses against diseases from measles to tuberculosis that it already produces annually. On February 23rd it dispatched the first mass shipment, of 70m shots of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, to India and two dozen other poor countries in the covax vaccine-sharing programme. On March 1st Canada said it will procure 500,000 doses from the company. The relatively small family concern, which entered last year with annual revenues of $735m and a workforce of 6,000, is becoming mission-critical to the global fight against the coronavirus.
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