I want to start with my last post. It contrasted a minority of countries that were good, were not too bad and the majority that were terrible at handling the pandemic. What surprised me was how willing people were to believe that each of the good countries had some special attribute that explained their superior performance, rather than accept the more obvious explanation that they had more practice at handling pandemics, or just had better governance. These countries that have handled the pandemic well knew that you needed a good TTI operation, you needed to keep case numbers low, you needed strong border control and in most cases that if you lose control of case numbers you lock down quickly and hard. The UK has failed on… [Read More...]
Two paths to controlling COVID with vaccinations
As vaccination is rolled out across advanced economies, the main danger has become mutations of the virus, or variants. We all know about the B.1.1.7 variant that emerged in the UK in September and helped generate the rapid rise in cases in December. We also know about the ‘South African’ variant (B.1.351), which appears to reducethe effectiveness of all vaccines to some degree. But these are just two of the better known variants, which seem to be emergingall the time (see also here). COVID variants are the reason that so many countries have now severely restricted travel (‘almost closed borders’) into their countries in recent weeks. One of these variants could severely reduce the effectiveness of a country’s vaccination programme. It is likely that scientists would… [Read More...]
French prosecutors are investigating whether senior ministers broke COVID-19 restrictions by dining in luxury restaurants
A picture taken on Avril 2, 2021 shows a view of the Eiffel Tower from behind a wooden fence in Paris. JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images French investigators are looking into whether senior ministers violated COVID-19 restrictions. The Paris prosecutor's office opened the investigation on Sunday, France24 reported. It comes after an M6 report said ministers were dining in luxury restaurants despite the lockdown. See more stories on Insider's business page. French prosecutors are investigating reports that senior ministers broke COVID-19 restrictions and dined in luxury restaurants in Paris, France24 reported. The investigation, which was opened on Sunday by the Paris prosecutor's office, was prompted by an undercover report from the French outlet M6 that luxury restaurants in wealthy Parisian neighborhoods were allowing "private&#… [Read More...]
Politicians and experts: austerity, Brexit and the pandemic
I’ll be talking about fiscal policy during and after the pandemic at a Resolution Foundation/MMF event in a week’s time: https://www.mmf.ac.uk/resolution-foundation/ I have written quite a few posts on the relationship between policy and expertise, and between expertise and the media. The better ones are in my book, but they were all written before the COVID pandemic. How does the relationship between experts on the one hand and politicians and the media on the other that we saw with economists over austerity and Brexit play out with medics and the pandemic? All three cases are different from each other. Although the evidence set out in my book suggests that the majority of academic economists opposed austerity (a majority that got… [Read More...]