Davos 2025 News | "Really Hate Mosquitoes": At Davos, Adar Poonawalla Explains Vaccine Plans To NDTV

So nice to be here with you in Davos and nice to move on from COVID and talk about anything else. From COVID, I just want to say I really hate mosquitoes. And they, as you know, kill more human beings than any other animal on the planet with all the different mosquito-borne diseases, from dengue, chikungunya, yellow fever, and even malaria of course. So with that in mind, after COVID, I sort of focused our capex and partnerships with various companies that we'll talk about to make vaccines for malaria, dengue, chikungunya, and yellow fever. Now those other vaccines are about two years away from launch, but we have launched, as you mentioned, the malaria vaccine, which is already beginning to protect children in Africa. And right now with Gavi's replenishment, where they need to raise billions of dollars for various vaccine programs in Africa, it is challenging to get enough funding to get the kind of vaccine coverage to scale up the volumes to be delivered and procured. So costing is an issue. Not well, yes. So that's where we played a major role. This malaria vaccine by other manufacturers in the West was being offered at $8 to $10. We have brought down that price to $4, so that's more than a 50% reduction, only with the objective of providing more access to more children who can now take it, with the budgets being strained.

Well, you know, we've been calling upon leaders and others here to step up to bridge that gap because there are other countries who can. $500 million is not a huge amount in the grand scheme of things for them to pitch in and contribute. I'm sure the WHO is already making plans to ensure that all their critical programs, like pre-qualifying vaccines and getting them approved and maintaining the standards for vaccines and other medicines, is a very critical aspect of what WHO does because all these other countries go by their quality standards and recommendations. So the impact to vaccine and other pharmaceutical companies could be there if this area is not looked at. But I'm sure the WHO will be focusing on their key areas and priorities so that nothing takes a back step. It's still early days to say, but I don't see any major impact as of now.

Well, it's 77%, which is very good. And we are working on next-gen vaccines which will be even better over the course of the next few years.

Yes, are you sort of part of that process? Yes, with Oxford, that's going on still with Oxford. But in the meanwhile, we're going to have a chikungunya vaccine in a year and a half, which is again a serious issue in India, a lot of people getting it. And also with climate change, we've seen a drastic increase in all these mosquito-borne viruses because when you've got construction going on in development in this part of the world, you have these water bodies which become a breeding ground for mosquitoes. You've got climate change where even a few degrees difference can increase the breeding of some of these mosquito species. So this is becoming an issue globally, not just in India. So we thought we'd focus a lot on our pipeline in that respect.