"The level of aggression is really unprecedented,” SII CEO Poonawalla flees to UK amid India's Covid crisis

In a bid to meet its supply commitments, the SerumInstitute of India's (SII) Chief Executive Officer Adar Poonawalla on Fridayhas fled to the United Kingdom to cope with the vaccine supply demands. Accordingto the UK media reports,  the company isplanning to start vaccine production in the UK, the media reported.

While speaking to the Times, the CEO of a Pune-based pharmaceutical company said that the company will make an official announcementin the upcoming days.

"The level of expectation and aggression is reallyunprecedented. It's overwhelming," Poonawalla told the publication.

Recently, SII had borrowed money from banks instead ofwaiting for the government's aid to arrive to scale up the production of itsCovishield vaccine.

The company assumed that the funding from the governmentwill reach them very soon, probably by this week.

Covishield has been developed by the Oxford Universityand AstraZeneca and manufactured by the SII.

The government recently announced that it has givenin-principle approval for credit to vaccine manufacturers, SII andHyderabad-based Bharat Biotech to boost India's vaccine production in the wake ofthe huge surge in Covid-19 caseload.

The Union Finance Ministry has approved a sanction of Rs3,000 crore credit for SII and Rs 1,500 crore to Bharat Biotech.

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Poonawalla, earlier, had suggested that the company wouldrequire around Rs 3,000 crore to increase production of Covid-19 vaccines.

Unfolding the events of stressful Covid situation inIndia and need for vaccination, CEO Poonawalla said the calls and throngs ofdesperate people who gather outside the Serum Institute’s 100-acre,state-of-the-art campus in Pune, 90 miles east of Mumbai, is the rationale why the government offered him security detail, and why the campus now hasround-the-clock police protection.

They are partly why Poonawalla flew to London to join hiswife and two children hours before Britain banned travelers from India eightdays ago. “I’m staying here an extended time because I don’t want to go back tothat situation,” he says. “Everything falls on my shoulders but I can’t do italone . . . I don’t want to be in a situation where you are just trying to doyour job, and just because you can’t supply the needs of X, Y or Z you reallydon’t want to guess what they are going to do.”