Top prize for Covax Australia founders at Gold Coast Young Entrepreneur Awards

The founders of Covax Australia added a feather in their cap when they received the top prize at the 2022 Gold Coast Young Entrepreneur Awards recently. Covax Australia may not have made it to the headlines of newspapers frequently but they have been quietly supporting national efforts to fight against the pandemic for the past over two years. Staying away most of the time from media limelight, former MedLab Pathology Queensland general manager Mannu Kala and his co-founder DrAnuj Gupta were quietly going about their job the results of which were discernible not merely in Queensland, but throughout Australia.

According to Business News Australia report, the highlights of some of their efforts compriseoperating specialist respiratory clinics right at the outset of the pandemic, managing drive-thru testing facilities, organising the logistics rollout of the vaccine, and more significantly the recent success in manufacturing PPE. In all these endeavoursCovax Australia stayed away from the limelight, though they were right there in strengthening the nation’s response to the pandemic.

Business News Australia report suggests that according to the judges of the award who chose Covax Australia for the top prize, it was all about efforts and entrepreneurial drive of the founders of Covax Australia that catapulted them to the top of the list of awardees and that’s how they won the Young Entrepreneur of the Year for the Gold Coast, though the competition for the award was tough given the fact that it included toppers like EVOLT co-founder and winner of the Trailblazer Award, Kelly Weideman.

Covax Australia was founded by Mannu Kala and DrAnuj Guptain 2020. The idea struck them after they realisedmost of the clinics and hospitals were unequippedto manage the respiratory illness of the population. This was also the time when there weren’t any adequate access to telehealth and specialist respiratory clinics were fewer in numbers. Moreover, general practitioner clinics started to refuse patients showing symptoms of COVID-19.

Taking to Business News Australia Dr Gupta, co-founder of Covax Australia said,“I decided that that was not going to happen to my patient cohort. So we put up a tent outside the clinic, and we started seeing patients - we didn’t have masks at the time, it was just gloves. The international borders were still open and the news coming from Italy was that there was a one in seven chance of dying.”

Subsequently with the pandemic showing no signs of relenting, states and the Federal Government asked them to assist in devising action plans and procedures for operating respiratory clinics, and to establish drive-thru testing sites. The pair wrote a white paper detailing the logistics processes so as to enable rolling out a COVID-19 vaccine and jabbing as many people as possible. This was the only way out of endless lockdowns. From there on, the Covax Australia began their endeavour to bring on Linfox and Qantas (ASX: QAN) to help move the inoculation nationwide, which was a very difficult task to accomplish.

“That set us up quite well with Queensland Health, and we essentially helped them establish the mass-immunisation clinics here in Queensland. We ran clinics from start-to-finish, and that included doctors, nurses, pharmacists, cleaning staff, security staff - the whole shebang,” Dr Gupta told Business News Australia.

More significantly as Dr Gupta toldBusiness News Australia“Whenever we were asked to do something by our local hospital, health service, district school, Queensland Health, Federal Health, we didn’t say no; we said ‘yep - we’ll give it a hit’.” From September 2020 to April this year, Covax Australia had about 900 active staff working every day in the company. Though the pandemic is not what it was at its peak, the business of Covax Australia has not declined as it now supports close to 100 aged care facilities with staffing solutions in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, reports Business News Australia.

Besides, the company also runs a manufacturing facility that produces rapid antigen tests, one of them being currently under consideration with the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

About the future, the co-founders visualize the businesswould continue to evolve, reports Business News Australia.