How Pfizer’s CEO wielded moral clarity to help his team do the impossible

When Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla asked his employees to compress years of vaccine development and manufacturing into months, he knew the first reaction would be resistance. Faced with a task that seemed unrealistic, even impossible, teams would do what large organizations often do best: marshal their intelligence to explain why it can’t be done.

Before Covid, Pfizer produced roughly 200 million vaccine doses a year. At the height of the pandemic, production had to surge to roughly 3 billion doses annually.