Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

by Adam Tooze

By the 2010s, two-thirds of the world’s children were vaccinated with jabs produced by India’s Serum Institute. The Serum Institute got its start in the early 1970s producing tetanus vaccine from horse serum to replace unaffordable imports.15 In the 1980s the company positioned itself as one of the mainstays of India’s Universal Immunisation Programme, which aims to provide complete coverage each year for the country’s giant 27-million-strong birth cohort.16 As the first developing world manufacturer to obtained prequalified status from the WHO, the Serum Institute in the 1990s became a global supplier. By the 2010s, at 1.3 billion shots per annum, it had the largest manufacturing capacity in the world.