A JAB OF GOOD HEALTH
WHEN VASANT (VAS) Narasimhan, the global CEO of Novartis AG, met Business Today at the company’s India office in Mumbai on February 17, 2020, India had already reported the first cases of the Coronavirus. They were three medical students who had returned to their native Kerala from Wuhan in the Hubei province of China. At that point, 1,523 people had died of the outbreak in Wuhan. For most Indians, the Coronavirus was just another curious case of a new virus surfacing in the Far East or Africa. A week before that, on February 11, the World Health Organization (WHO) had baptised ‘Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV2’ with a new name—‘Covid-19’—and was yet to declare the outbreak a ‘pandemic’.
Naturally, Covid-19 was also a point of discussion with Narasimhan. Replying to a question on why big multinational pharmaceutical companies were not researching on developing vaccines for such viruses, the US-born Indian executive said, “Right now, we don’t have a great market for these antibiotics. Usually it doesn’t make for a great business case, because you don’t know whether the virus will remain or not.” If a company takes the risk of researching a vaccine for a virus outbreak, the virus itself may disappear by the time the vaccine reaches the market, and it may or may not resurface again, he had explained. So, it is the job of governments to fund such public health concerns.
Covid-19 soon spread across the globe. As of September 14, 2021, the virus has infected over 220 million people and caused the death of 4.4 million people. Within weeks of that interview, Narasimhan had to take up additional responsibility to save humankind, as the co-chair of a consortium of
