Adar Poonawalla: the vaccine prince who will save the world

Adar Poonawalla, the chief of the world’s biggest vaccine manufacturer by volume, has an ambitious plan to rescue us all from Covid-19. The future for his dynasty looks bright, says Jane Lewis.

Adar Poonawalla
(Image credit: © REUTERS / Alamy Stock Photo)

If the world manages to escape the clutches of Covid-19 this year, it may be largely down to the efforts of Adar Poonawalla – the Indian tycoon known as “the vaccine prince”, says The Times. Poonawalla’s company, Serum Institute of India (SII), is “comfortably the biggest vaccine manufacturer by volume in the world”: some two-thirds of all the children on the planet have been vaccinated with one or more of its products. The company makes 1.5 billion doses of vaccines annually against diseases such as polio, diphtheria and hepatitis B.

Now Poonawalla, 39, “has an ambitious plan” to supply the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine to half the planet by this time next year. And he plans to do so at $3 a dose, “which barely covers costs”. When the pandemic set in, he says, “I decided to go all out” – immediately embarking on a dramatic expansion of manufacturing facilities funded by £270m of his company’s money and another £3m from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The family has cash to spare. According to Forbes, his father, Cyrus Poonawalla, who founded the company in 1966, is worth $11.5bn, making him India’s sixth richest man last year.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.