Must work without disruption, allow companies to provide booster doses to employees: Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

Biocon Chief Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw urges PM Modi to allow companies to provide booster doses to employees. (Photo for representation. Picture credit: PTI)

A day after Biocon executive chairperson Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw took to Twitter and urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to allow companies to provide booster doses of the Covid-19 vaccine to their employees, India Today TV Consulting Editor Rajdeep Sardesai spoke to the entrepreneur on how the surge in Covid cases has resulted in a growing demand for booster doses and how has it impacted large companies and the economy.

Excerpts from the interview:

Q) You’ve taken to Twitter suggesting that booster doses must be available to all employers so they can be administered to employees to avoid work disruption. Do you believe booster doses should be accessible to all age groups?

Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, executive chairperson and founder, Biocon

Since we do not have a situation of vaccine inadequacy any more, I think we have adequate vaccines with which we can actually deliver booster doses to all. As an employer, we know the kind of work disruption we are seeing with over 300 people testing positive in a company such as ours, which you know is a manufacturing and R&D-driven company. We must have people coming to work. When you have this kind of an issue, it disrupts your manufacturing, R&D and many other enabling functions.

I, for one, would like to give booster doses to all my employees so that we actually prevent such surges that we see presently.

FULL INTERVIEW

Q) The government, however, plans to doubly vaccinate India’s remaining adult population. What’s your take?

The remaining adult population can be easily vaccinated because we have adequate vaccines to carry out the remainder of the vaccinations for our population.

I am not asking the government to deliver booster doses to everyone, but I do believe it should be opened to the private sector and the private market to allow people who want to be boosted. There’s a lot of anxiety among people. While there’s a huge need to basically allay people’s fears, there’s a growing need for employers to carry out their activities. There has already been a deep impact on our economic revival. We need to get back to the pace at which we were growing. The only safe way to do that is to allow people to get booster shots.

Q) There’s no guarantee that getting the vaccine will prevent infection or transmissibility. There’s a growing concern that perhaps we don’t need to limit ourselves to Covishield or Covaxin. Where are the other vaccines, like Covovax and Corbevax, which could be used for booster doses?

There’s enough data to show that when you combine Covishield with Covovax, there’s very good data that your immunity is enhanced in a very sharp way, as opposed to taking three doses of Covishield. I think there’s absolute merit in getting Covovax and Corbevax as booster doses or precautionary doses.

Q) Will employers take the responsibility of administering booster doses to their employees, which in a way will widen the net in vaccinating the adult population?

We had shouldered this responsibility even during vaccinations, and we will take it even in the case of administering booster doses. A large number of big organisations are certainly prepared to do that.