VACCINE CAPITALISM

Pfizer deserves every bit of the credit it’s receiving. But should a drug company decide who gets a shot?

- Stephanie Baker, Cynthia Koons, and Vernon Silver

It’s not every day that a head of government goes to the airport to greet a cargo shipment, but the pandemic has changed many things. On Jan. 10, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu motorcaded to Ben Gurion International Airport, southeast of Tel Aviv, to watch a shipment of 700,000 vaccine doses from Pfizer Inc. emerge from a blue-and-white El Al Boeing 787-9.

“This is a great day for the state of Israel, with a huge shipment that has arrived,” Netanyahu said, exuding a confidence few world leaders have mustered since the crisis began. “I agreed with my friend, Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla, that we would bring shipment after shipment and complete the vaccination of the over-16 population in Israel during the month of March.”

Bourla had thrown Netanyahu a political lifeline. Faced with surging Covid-19 cases and an election in March, the prime minister latched on to Pfizer’s vaccine as his best hope to stay in office. Standing on the tarmac, he bragged that 72% of Israelis over the age of 60 had already been vaccinated, thanks to shipments that began in early December, and that more doses would come soon. That was because he’d struck a deal with Bourla to use his country as a test case for Pfizer’s vaccine.

Vaccine distribution still has the feel of a zero-sum game. Five days after Netanyahu’s victory lap, Pfizer told other nonU.S. customers that it would cut near-term supplies while it briefly closed its vaccine manufacturing facility in Belgium for an upgrade.