Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

by Adam Tooze

It was a revealing discussion. A sum of €500 million was either a lot of money or absurdly parsimonious. If it had chosen to do so, Germany could have borrowed the funds necessary to meet not just the immediate needs of COVAX, but the entire projected cost of vaccinating the world—estimated, as of May 2020, at $25 billion—and it could have done so at negative interest rates. Instead, it chipped in €500 million and waited for others to do their bit.41 The same logic, of course, applied to every other member of the G20. With the possible exception of Argentina and South Africa, any one of them could have justified the spending needed to end the pandemic and restart the world economy, on grounds of self-interest alone. In truth, even for the big drug companies, the vaccines were not a life-and-death issue. Pfizer had revenues in excess of $50 billion per annum prior to the crisis. The estimated coronavirus vaccine revenue of $14.6 billion it would split with BioNTech in 2021 was an important addition, but by no means decisive to the firm’s long-term future.42 Of greater long-term importance was the mRNA technology.