When Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla asked his employees to compress years of vaccine development and manufacturing into months, he knew the first reaction would be resistance. Faced with a task that seemed unrealistic, even impossible, teams would do what large organizations often do best: marshal their intelligence to explain why it can’t be done.
Before Covid, Pfizer produced roughly 200 million vaccine doses a year. At the height of the pandemic, production had to surge to roughly 3 billion doses annually. Scaling manufacturing to that level was, in Bourla’s view, as daunting as developing a vaccine in short order—if not more so. While public attention focused on the scientific leap forward, the operational challenges demanded an equally radical shift in mindset.
