The development of vaccines has proved revolutionary, transforming our approach to eradicating life-threatening diseases. In Vaccine Nation: How Immunisation Shaped India, Ameer Shahul chronicles the highly underappreciated story of how India emerged as a global vaccine powerhouse—one of the largest producers of high-quality, cost-effective vaccines, supplying effective immunisations to over a hundred countries. He traces how the country blazed fresh trails in innovation after having languished on the sidelines during the colonial era, held back by British apathy and a near-nonexistent healthcare infrastructure.
Shahul offers a meticulous and sweeping account of India’s immunisation journey. The story begins in the early twentieth century, when the British established vaccine institutions in cool hill stations, designed to serve colonial officers rather than the colonised masses—emblematic of a civilisational gulf deepened by racism, poverty and illiteracy. Though the seeds had been sown, independent India had little to build on, emerging bruised and battered after centuries of oppression and the fresh wounds of a bloody Partition, guided largely by a vision of self-reliance.
With a sound grasp of science, Shahul is also a compelling storyteller, sketching vivid portraits of giants in the field such as Waldemar Haffkine, Sahib Singh Sokhey, Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, John Jacob, Gursaran Talwar, Varaprasad Reddy and Cyrus Poonawala. He peppers the narrative with striking anecdotes—including the claim that had a closely guarded secret about Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s health been revealed, Partition itself might have been averted. His account of the development and production of the 1957 influenza vaccine in less than four months—still a record—is particularly thrilling.
Equally gripping is his narration of a desi David-versus-Goliath tale. Varaprasad Reddy and his Shantha team, inspired by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin—who famously refused to patent their groundbreaking work on polio—dared to launch Shanvac-B, an effective hepatitis B vaccine priced at about one dollar. Despite dire predictions, the venture turned profitable and forced market prices to drop dramatically, delivering a stinging rebuke to rapacious big pharma. As Shahul notes, “Shantha had held a mirror to the true face of foreign vaccine companies operating in India. Indian health administrators and regulators were stunned to discover that a company claiming to ‘exist to save lives’ had been selling a life-saving vaccine at 150 times its cost!”
While generously celebrating success stories and unlikely heroes in this epic of vaccination, Shahul does not shy away from sharp criticism of those within and outside the system who enabled corruption and profiteering. He documents how many failures led to human rights violations and egregious breaches of medical ethics, with innovation repeatedly undermined by exploitation. Pulling no punches, the author recounts the sordid saga of the excesses of PMK leader S Ramadoss during his tenure as Health Minister after the 2004 elections under the United Progressive Alliance. Decades of hard-won progress were undone through unsavoury manoeuvres, including the unjust suspension of licences of three reputed, government-supported vaccine makers for personal gain. The result was a largely preventable, man-made vaccine shortage that reached catastrophic proportions and directly contributed to the unaccounted deaths of countless infants. Despite mounting pressure and censure, those responsible were never brought to justice. The fallout, Shahul writes, was near nuclear: “The vaccine sector had by now morphed into a theatre of political influence, with pharma giants currying favour with their political benefactors through opaque instruments like electoral bonds.”
Recounting India’s successes and failures during the Covid-19 pandemic, Shahul makes it clear that vaccine equity remains elusive. Wealthy Western nations remain unwilling to share technology or meaningfully assist, while within India an alarming trend has emerged in which science is bent to suit ideological narratives. In conclusion, Shahul urges, “Let India not just remain the vaccine capital of the world but also become its conscience—advancing science not merely for prestige, but for purpose.”