New Delhi, Dec 14 (PTI) The COVID-19 pandemic brought out the importance of investing in affordable technologies and innovation to deliver life-saving vaccines, biotechnology major Biocon’s Executive Chairperson Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw said on Tuesday.
Addressing the sixth annual Global Technology Summit co-hosted with the Ministry of External Affairs on Tuesday, Mazumdar-Shaw said it was also very important to see the kind of inequities that existed in the world when it came to vaccines.
“Although we are now at a stage of vaccine adequacy, during the time of vaccine inadequacy, there was a huge amount of inequity as we all know… low middle income countries and middle income countries are still woefully short of having any safe level of immunisation,” she observed.
She said the pandemic brought out the importance of investing in affordable technologies and innovation to deliver important life-saving vaccines.
Talking about applicability of booster doses in view of the Omicron variant, she said if there is evidence to show that one can get more protection against severe disease with a booster shot, then nobody can argue against it.
“But at the same time, I think we also know that there’s enough immune escape taking place with the new variants.
“So you know, would you like to start randomly immunising everybody with a booster shot or should you basically target those who are vulnerable, those who are immunocompromised, those who are frontline workers with this kind of extra protection,” she said. PTI UZM ABM ABM
