The Serum Institute, which is exclusively controlled by a small and fabulously rich Indian family and started out years ago as a horse farm, is doing what a few other companies in the race for a vaccine are doing: mass-producing hundreds of millions of doses of a vaccine candidate that is still in trials and might not even work.

Blood samples from coronavirus vaccine trials are handled inside the Jenner Institute in Oxford, England, on June 25, 2020.

In a video call Monday with the Financial Times, Adar Poonawalla, CEO of Serum Institute of India (SII), estimated that the feat will require 15 billion doses for a two-doses-per-person vaccine.

Even if a vaccine were ready by early next year, as India’s health minister Harsh Vardan predicted in remarks Sunday, there won’t be enough doses to vaccinate the entire global population until 2024, Poonawalla said.

SSI has partnered with other drug makers, including AstraZeneca and Noravax, to develop a vaccine and committed to producing 1 billion doses, half of which would go to India.