There's nothing wrong with profiting from a vaccine

A couple of shots to the arm and this will all be over. With today’s news from Moderna, last week’s from Pfizer, and with a potential update from AstraZeneca in the next few days, we may soon have three vaccines against Covid-19 (and if you add in candidates from Russia and China perhaps more). And yet, it turns out, that some people are already fretting about potential side effects from that. And they don’t just mean a mild fever or muscle ache. They mean something far, far nastier. Profits.

While most of us have been feeling a lot better about the epidemic over the last week, Jeremy Corbyn seems most worried that — once a vaccine has been approved and the virus eliminated — a big company might make some money from it. ‘A vaccine should not become a privatised commodity used for corporate profiteering,’ he tweeted over the weekend. ‘Instead it should be a global public good and shared with the world.’