Temporary Doses

TURN YOUR MIND back to the beginning of the pandemic when the promise of a vaccine hung in the air of fear and then the great move to manufacture it and then to distrib­ute it, and even then to wrangle it so that the massive Indian population could get it. And then the population themselves, hunched over the mobile app desperately trying to get a slot because it could be that deciding factor between life and death for their family, or at least that was how the sentiment went. In India, it was Covishield that was the object of such medical attainment and the company that created it was AstraZeneca. This week, they said that the vaccine, which goes by the name Vaxzevria abroad, is of­ficially being withdrawn. The reason cited is too much competition and too little demand. But there was also some bad press after it was forced to admit recently that in very rare cases, the vaccine had a serious side effect involving blood clots and low platelet counts. Whereas, earlier, there would be vociferous voices defending vaccines despite rare side effects, now it was muted because people had moved on.

The story of the vaccine is also a lesson on the twists of fate. AstraZeneca was at the right time with the right tech­nology. The bounty came unexpectedly because the process, of using a weak­ened virus that causes cold in chimpan­zees to carry material of the Covid virus into human cells in order to engineer an immune defence, was available and could be purposed fast. It could bypass testing regulations that would other­wise have taken years and bring it into the market soon because of the nature of the emergency. While they wouldn’t be able to price as they chose, because of the phenomenal volumes at play, they would still make outsized profits. Between 2019, the year before Covid, and 2023, AstraZeneca’s net profits rose more than four times to just under $6 billion.

There is also a message in all this that unexpected rewards do not continue forever. And that the very nature of the reward creates competition because others want a slice of it. Finally, all pan­demics end and then, suddenly, there is the necessity on maintaining a growth that came abruptly but is hard to keep up when the underlying cause of it no longer exists. On the flip side, there now exists a chest of cash which can be used for future growth if one goes about it wisely. Or it can be squandered away. The ability of companies and human beings to thrive depends on how they walk this line.

Everything becomes irrelevant when their time is over and the Astra­Zeneca vaccine was never going to be an exception to the rule. The technol­ogy itself has however got the best test­ing possible in the history of humanity. It now has the potential to be used for other treatments. One thing leads to another even if what started it off no longer remains germane.

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