SII’s Adar Poonawalla has interesting take on vaccines fighting Omicron, Delta

The post is a video clip from the movie Home Alone. In it, the character of Macaulay Culkin has been named “vaccine” while the two thieves are “Omicron” and “Delta”.

“What’s going on here!?” he wrote. 

It is supposed to signify how Covid-19 vaccines are fighting and winning against the new variants of coronavirus that have wreaked havoc in many countries. 

This post, says Poonawalla, is courtesy Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which had shared the video earlier in the day. 

It caption the video: “This is my body, I have to defend it! Reminder: Being vaccinated and boosted is your best line of defense against severe illness from COVID-19.”

Poonawalla had earlier said that Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy is now the greatest threat in overcoming this pandemic.

Urging all adults to get vaccinated as soon as possible, the Serum chief had said that the vaccine industry has worked tirelessly to provide enough stocks for the nation.

Recently, the University of Oxford has announced plans to establish a new Poonawalla Vaccines Research Building with a funding commitment of GBP 50 million from India’s Serum Life Sciences.

Serum Life Sciences is wholly-owned by the Poonawalla family, owners of the Adar Poonawalla-led Serum Institute of India, and the proposed research facility will focus on vaccinology.

The facility will be established at the university’s Old Road Campus, and will house over 300 research scientists.

It is expected to provide the focus and scale for the university’s major vaccine development programmes allowing a rapid, productive and timely expansion of this fast-growing translational area.

“I am delighted that through this generous gift, we will be able to further our work on vaccines which have proven so critical to global health. We will also ensure that we are never again caught unprepared for a global pandemic,” Professor Louise Richardson, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford.

“The university has longstanding ties with the Poonawalla family and we were delighted to confer an honorary degree on Cyrus Poonawalla in Summer 2019 in recognition of his extraordinary work manufacturing inexpensive vaccines for the developing world,” she said.