CONSIDER THE following thought experiment. If you fail to eat a pizza within an hour, you will die from hunger. What do you do? Most people would immediately order a pizza-and not just one Margherita, but lots of them, from several different parlours. In order to maximise the chances that at least one pizzeria got you what you needed in time, you would not care that some of the pizza would be sure to go to waste. The world is hungry for a vaccine against covid-19. So far about 700,000 deaths have been recorded from the disease, and the total is increasing at a rate of roughly 40,000 a week. If you also include unrecorded deaths, the actual numbers are much higher. Meanwhile, the global economy is experiencing its sharpest contraction since the Great Depression, of perhaps 8% of GDP in the first half of 2020.
展开▼
