Putting big pharma in charge of global vaccine rollout was a big mistake

‘Pfizer’s chief executive, Albert Bourla, derided the sharing of vaccine recipes as ‘nonsense’ – and said it was ‘dangerous’ to share companies’ intellectual property.’ Photograph: John Thys/EPA

Pfizer has had an exceptionally good pandemic. Today it announced that its Covid-19 vaccine brought in $37bn billion last year, making it easily the most lucrative medicine in any given year in history.

That isn’t all. For a company that was until recently the least trusted company in the least trusted industrial sector in the United States, Covid-19 has been a PR coup. Pfizer has become a household name over the last 12 months. The company was toasted on nights out in Tel Aviv, and there are cocktails named after its vaccine in bars across the world. The US president referred to Pfizer’s chief executive, Albert Bourla, as a “good friend”, and the great man parked his jet next to Boris Johnson’s at last year’s G7 summit in Cornwall.