Adar Poonawalla shares hilarious video showing booster shot defeating Omicron: Watch here

Amid studies, research and debate going on about booster Covid-19 vaccination and its requirement, especially in the context of a new and highly contagious variant of the coronavirus, Omicron, Serum Institute of India (SII) chief Adar Poonawalla shared a lighter moment on these concerns.

Taking to Twitter, the CEO of the world's largest vaccine manufacturing company, which is also locally producing the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine called 'Covishield', shared a hilarious meme video in which it is shown how a Covid vaccine booster dose is defeating the Omicron variant of Covid-19.

The video, created by US-based Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, portrays a clip from the 1990 hit movie Home Alone in a meme format, showing how effective the booster dose can be against Omicron. In the short video, it can be seen that a boy is fighting two men marked as Delta and Omicron variants of the virus. When he wins over one of the two men (Delta) by throwing a bucket (marked as vaccine), another (Omicron) rushes towards the boy. The boy then defeats the second man (Omicron) by using another bucket (marked as booster dose of the vaccine).

Sharing this 18-second-ling clip, Poonawalla posted, “What’s going on here!?"

The post has garnered over 5,000 liked and more than 900 retweets since it was posted yesterday.

Poonawalla’s tweet comes a day after the head of the World Health Organization warned that blanket booster programmes in rich countries risk prolonging the world's battle with COVID-19 and said that “no country can boost its way out of the pandemic.”

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the priority must be to reduce deaths and help all countries meet minimum vaccination targets that many still haven't reached. And he noted that “the vast majority of hospitalizations and deaths are in unvaccinated people, not unboosted people.”

Tedros said that, while vaccines have saved many lives this year, their unequal sharing “has cost many lives.” In 2021, 3.5 million people were lost to COVID-19, he said, and “all of us need to take extra precautions” as the new omicron variant advances.

The WHO chief has previously called for a moratorium on boosters for healthy adults until the end of this year to counter unequal global vaccine distribution.

Meanwhile, the total number of Omicron cases in India has risen to 236, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare data stated earlier today. Of the total 236 Omicron patients, 104 have recovered, the ministry said.