Is this vaccine the big Covid-19 breakthrough?

A vaccine that appears so far to be safe and effective is making its way through the final trials before commercialisation. There are reasons to be cheerfully optimistic, says Simon Wilson.

What’s new?

The German drug company BioNTech and its US partner, Pfizer, announced on Monday that their Covid-19 vaccine has been found to be 90% effective. The drug remains in phase-three clinical trials, and there are significant unknowns around the extent of its effectiveness, as well as challenges around scaling up and distribution (the vaccine has to be stored at temperatures around –75˚C). But there is hope.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.