The shot that saves

Time travel across a century of India's vaccine story

- SOMA DAS

FOUR FREEDOM fighters had known that Muhammad Ali Jinnah was suffering fast-deteriorating and life-threatening tuberculosis in the mid 1940s with less than a few years to live while he was negotiating breaking up of the nation, could it have averted the Partition? Had Cyrus Poonawalla's mare not died due to bureaucratic delay in allowing antivenom to be used, would Serum Institute of India, one of the country's largest private vaccine majors, still be formed? Packing such rich side stories as segways to enter a narration of a highly scientific subject, former journalist Ameer Shahul attempts an ambitious broad-arc history of vaccines and vaccination in India in the book Vaccine Nation: How Immunization Shaped India.

The book traverses India's active role in global vaccine research landscape from 1890s to 1940s; the next two decades-1950s and 60s-that can be dubbed as the dark ages for vaccine research, during which the focus on this critical public health tool fell off the map of priorities of policymakers in a newly independent country; and then the journey of the country regaining its eminent position as a vaccine-producing global leader in the decades that followed, ending just after Covid-19 during which India played a significant role in making vaccines for the world, vaccinating its own people and in vaccine-diplomacy, at a time when vaccine, a scarce resource, became a weapon in geopolitics.