1/4. The #Haffkine Institute in Mumbai was recently given the go-ahead to manufacture a Covid vaccine, but did you know that the man after whom the institute is named, and who developed the plague vaccine in Bombay, left the country discredited and disgraced?
#MakingofModernIndia

2/4. India played a critical role in both the vaccines developed by Russian bacteriologist Waldemar Haffkine. He developed the bubonic plague vaccine in Bombay in January 1897, and introduced the cholera vaccine he had developed in Paris, to Calcutta in 1893.

3/4. But disaster struck in March 1902, when 19 people died in Punjab after being inoculated with Haffkine’s plague vaccine. It seems a vial had been contaminated. Haffkine was fired as director of the Plague Research Laboratory in Bombay.

4/4. Some believe Haffkine was framed as he was a Jew; others feel he had been discredited as he wasn’t a medical doctor. Haffkine was exonerated, but the man who gave the world not one but two vaccines never conducted another trial again. He died in Switzerland, a lonely man.