My question is only partly rhetorical. Just two days after I published my post “Vaccine Adventures,” I read in the Wall Street Journal that the federal and state governments had started allocating vaccines to large pharmacy chains, including Walmart (Sharon Terlep and Jaewon Kang, “CVS and Walmart Decide Who Gets Leftover Covid-19 Vaccine Doses,” February 11). After reading this story in the wee hours of February 12, I went on Walmart’s website and, in just a few minutes, made myself an appointment for six days later. Appointments are available at 20-minute intervals during the whole day.

The efficiency of Walmart is legendary despite its being a behemoth, just as the inefficiency of the government is legendary because it is a behemoth (and other reasons explored by the economics of public choice).

Yesterday, another Wall Street Journal story described the rollout of Walmart’s Covid-19 vaccination (Sarah Nassauer, “Walmart’s Covid-19 Vaccine Rollout Heads to Small Town,” February 14). To get an idea of “what the weather [is] really like on earth” (le vrai temps qu’il fait sur la terre) to borrow an expression from Saint-Exupéry (in his novel Southern Mail or Courrier Sud), a few quotes from this Wall Street Journal story are useful:

Skowhegan, Maine—Pat and John Thomas were watching the news one night last week when they saw that Walmart in this central Maine town of 8,000 people was taking appointments for the Covid-19 vaccination. They had signed up for shots at a hospital about a month ago but still hadn’t heard back. Ms. Thomas, a 74-year-old retiree, jumped on the computer.

On Friday the couple got the Skowhegan Walmart’s first doses …

Walmart Inc., the U.S.’s largest retailer and private employer, is set to become one of the biggest distributors of the Covid-19 vaccine as the federal government enlists retail pharmacies to accelerate what has been a choppy rollout. …

Walmart is likely to benefit in other ways. Many of the people getting the vaccine at the Skowhegan store Friday didn’t previously have patient profiles in Walmart’s system, said [regional Walmart manager] Mr. Tozier. “We are making relationships with new patients,” he said.

Ann Jackson and her husband, Norman Jackson, 73 and 76 years old respectively, arrived for their vaccine appointment midmorning after waiting for weeks to get an appointment at the local hospital, said Ms. Jackson. Later, she added chips, bananas and T-shirts to her cart. “You never want to waste the trip to Walmart,” she said.

Contrary to what I implied in my previous post, there seem to be incentives enough for private pharmacies, at least those with a Walmart sort of efficient logistics, to administer Covid-19 vaccines when Big Brother releases them.

Such recourse to private enterprise could partly protect us from the central planners in DC and the state capitals. But why give the vaccines to some private organizations but not others—say, to Walmart but not to Hannaford? Is it because the central planners know better where demand is most intense or where low-cost distribution is most likely? That would possibly be a first in the history of mankind.

It would have been much more efficient, from the beginning, if the government had sold the vaccines to whoever was willing to buy them in order to make a profit and had given vouchers to whoever wanted to be vaccinated. After this redistribution of purchasing power, the market—that is, individual demands—would have decided where the vaccines should go.