Eli Lilly and Company has been one of the companies on the frontlines of the COVID-19 response – see the story on CEO Dave Ricks as the 2020 Ogletree Deakins Business Leader of the Year in the current BizVoice® magazine – but it is certainly not unchartered territory for the organization.

In the interview for BizVoice, Ricks said, There’s a long history in the company of responding to public health emergencies.” He cites two prominent examples:

“When there was that breakthrough with the (Jonas) Salk (polio) vaccine his laboratory took an approach to say, ‘Whoever is willing to put capital behind this, we’ll give them the recipe basically.’ And Lilly ended up being one of the first to step forward. We were the leading producer of the polio vaccine in the United States for the first two years, which saw the most population inoculated. Then we shut all that down as we’re not a vaccine company.”

The polio vaccine came less than a decade after the previous example.

“The other one is during World War II when early in the deployment, the Defense department asked companies to step forward and make penicillin en masse. As you probably know, during every war prior to World War II, more people died of infection than of wounds in battle. The U S military was determined not to have that. And it was the first war that didn’t occur. It’s really because of penicillin, mass produced.

“Lilly, along with Pfizer, were the two big companies that stepped up. That became the start of a new and long-running business for the company in antibiotics, which we exited in the 1990s. It was a 50-year run, but it started as a response to a call for action for public health.”

A January-February 2018 BizVoice story outlines some the transitions that took place among Indiana businesses to assist in the World War II effort.

Tom Schuman is the senior vice president of communications & operations for the Indiana Chamber. He is also the editor of the Chamber’s award-winning BizVoice magazine and has been with the organization for 22 years.