Five people died on Thursday when a fire tore through a building in the world’s biggest vaccine manufacturing hub in India, but the company insisted that production of drugs to counter the COVID-19 pandemic would continue.
Rescue workers discovered five bodies after the blaze at the Serum Institute of India was brought under control, reports said, with officials in Pune confirming the death toll.
A second, smaller blaze broke out in the same building later, reports said.
Photo: Reuters
“Five people have died,” Pune Mayor Murlidhar Mohol said.
TV channels showed thick clouds of gray smoke billowing from the sprawling site, which is responsible for producing millions of doses of the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford.
“It is not going to affect production of the COVID-19 vaccine,” a Serum Institute source said, adding the blaze was at a new facility being built on the campus.
“We are deeply saddened and offer our deepest condolences to the family members of the departed,” Serum Institute of India chief executive officer Adar Poonawalla wrote on Twitter, without offering further details.
Founder of the firm, Cyrus Poonawalla, Adar’s father, said in a statement that the families of each of the five victims — who were reported to be contract laborers — would be given 2.5 million rupees (US$34,215) in compensation.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that he was “anguished by the loss of lives.”
Both police and the company said the cause of the blaze was not immediately known.
The complex where the fire broke out is a few minutes’ drive from the facility where the COVID-19 vaccines are produced, reports said.
As many as nine buildings are under construction at the complex to enhance its manufacturing capability, NDTV reported.
Serum Institute of India is the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer by volume, producing 1.5 billion doses a year, even before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The firm makes vaccines against polio, diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis B, and measles, mumps and rubella, which are exported to more than 170 nations, and many of them are also relying on the firm to supply them with the COVID-19 vaccine.
India on Wednesday exported the first batch — to Bhutan and the Maldives — followed on Thursday by 2 million doses to Bangladesh and 1 million doses to Nepal.
The firm also plans to supply 200 million doses to COVAX, a WHO-backed effort to procure and distribute inoculations to less-developed nations.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the