Pfizer’s Covid vaccine is a victory for the free market

There are still safety trials to be completed. Data has to be collected, checked, double-checked, and then peer-reviewed. And we still need to find out whether it is the most effective of the various candidates currently in development or whether there is something even better just around the corner. But the Pfizer vaccine has already proved something beyond any reasonable doubt. Free enterprise works. And for all its flaws, it remains the best system for solving complex problems.

Amid all the justifiable excitement over the potential approval of the first safe and effective vaccine against Covid-19 it would be easy to overlook one point: the vaccine was developed with private money. The US government set up Operation Warp Speed to fund lots of different initiatives for finding a scientific way out of this mess. But the American drugs giant decided against taking the money. The reasons were explained by its chief executive Dr Albert Bourla in an interview on American television, and his remarks are worth