Pfizer

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

After a difficult nine months, we are naturally all sick of lockdowns and other Covid restrictions. Everyone misses parts of their pre-coronavirus lives, from seeing friends and family, to pubs and restaurants, to the theatre and concerts and, yes, even our workplaces. It was therefore no surprise that this week’s news of a vaccine breakthrough was widely applauded. It is human nature, after all, to cling on to things that give us hope. Hope that was encouraged by leading scientists such as Sir John Bell. After the Pfizer news broke, the Oxford professor was asked on BBC radio whether we would be returning to normal by spring. His response? ‘Yes,

So is this the big turning point? Markets certainly seem to think so. No sooner had news broken that the vaccine being developed by Pfizer and German firm BioNTech is 90 per cent effective, the FTSE surged by 5 per cent. Given that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has suggested that any vaccine that proves to be more than 50 per cent effective could be licensed, this suggests the vaccine will go on to be approved around the world. Any vaccine that proves partly effective will be welcomed with open arms by a world which largely remains in lockdown or semi-lockdown. But does the reality live up the