When nurse May Parsons administered the first injection in the world of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to ninety-year-old British grandmother Margaret Keenan, applauded by dozens of moist-eyed medical staff at University Hospital, Coventry, it was as glorious and moving a moment as any humanity has ever seen.

A jaw-dropping marvel of science, economic planning, and selfless, humanist cooperation by thousands of researchers around the globe, the development of this and other vaccines hot on Pfizer’s heels has taken a mere nine months since the discovery of the disease, rather than the years or even decades such medical research and development (R&D) normally takes. They offer a glimpse of how much more an egalitarian, rationalist world could produce and achieve, freed from the fetters of profit.

While the American private pharmaceutical giant and its German biotech start-up partner may bear the name of the first vaccine, this is no triumph for capitalism. Pfizer-BioNTech, along with the second-place finisher, Moderna, and the other front-runners, all depended on years of public-sector funding for their success, and, in many cases, on research actually performed by government or public university labs long before 2020. And again during this plague year, these private companies relied on state shepherding and bankrolling of the vaccine development process or, in the case of Pfizer, state-guaranteed purchase of millions of doses.