The fuel injected Brexiter comments on the EU's vaccine problems miss many points.
1) no-one wanted to get out of the EU or the single market to protect ourselves better against a pandemic. See Brexit Tory controlled government policy 2016-2020 regarding the NHS and pandemic preparedness.
2) we could have, and, perhaps thanks to the need to genuflect to nationalists, or out of pragmatic needs, chosen to go our own way on procurement even within the EU.
3) none of this explains why it's good to be outside the single market, restricting our trade and making us poorer.
4) the implicit celebration of the vaccine nationalist cause, seemingly [but not actually] permitted by Brexit, ignores how this game plays out, namely:
a) the EU retalliates with sanctions now or in the future.
b) we expose ourselves to mishaps in our domestic supply chains of the vaccine production we delightedly hold onto as 'ours'.
c) this is not a one-shot game. We are into a perpetual period of mutation, vaccine tweaking, vaccine delivery. We may be unlucky in not devising and manufacturing good tweaks and need to spread the innovation risk globally.
If anyone wants me to write 'Vaccination nationalism: not a one shot game' for their paper/magazine, obvs I am nearly there as I have the pun headline sorted.
It's actually a really nice econ teaching topic, as it brings together specialization, risk management under uncertainty, game theory, time consistency, political economy, international relations. Normal trade policy but on acid.
The interesting bit of political economy is how the electoral horizon relates to the horizon at which we are fighting covid. A quick vaccine war concluded before 2024 could be great to get another term. But the payback and extra deaths would come later.
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1. IMO there is a very clear near-term benefit to not exporting vaccines. Fewer UK people die/left with long covid, travel restrictions excepted, life returns to normal faster.
2. The cost benefit analysis in the longer term is less clear cut; the EU could retalliate during the endless vaccine tweak and top-up phase. Or with other measures.
3. In general, vaccine nationalism - like any trade nationalism - is a bad thing. Cooperation better. Unvaccinated foreigners will infect us and incubate mutations that infect us and render our clung onto domestic vaccines obsolete faster.
1. The government and particularly the PM was complacent in getting into gear as the virus gathered pace in China and Italy.
2. The March lockdown came far too late. A fault that may lie with the govt and the scientists advising; perhaps the latter were incorrectly assuming a lockdown would not be agreed to and so did not recommend it early enough.
Also interesting is how one country choosing not or unable to control the virus creates negative spillovers [raising the chance of generating a new more malign variant] for other countries.
How would you combat this? Carrots and sticks for those choosing not to control the virus [sanctions, conditional aid]; aid for those unable to control it.
Another interesting issue arises that if you pursued a vaccine nationalist strategy to the great detriment of a country you are connected to this could rebound on you and others by allowing new variants to incubate and eventually unravel your suppression strategy.
Not always the mouthpiece of govt; sometimes the mouthpiece of other anonymous persons working for interested parties. Why not wait until you have a corroborated and sourced story weighing it all up and then write that?
Like an economist tweeting 'I've just opened Matlab and initialised some parametes and matrix entries!' 'Anonymous sources say there might indeed be a paper here'.
I don't understand Robert's incentives. He's at the top of his game. A superstar. Book deals when he feels like it. Pime time tv shows when he wants on what he wants. Why bother with this. There is no race that needs to be won that these 'get there first' tweets can help.
In a parallel world, the Virus Policy Commitee of the Centre for Economics and Epidemiology has just voted options for vaccine prioritization and trajectories for lockdown release.
The voting helped focus Government and 'Covid Recovery Group' minds on the consequences of early relaxations, given stark forecasts for the number that would die or be left long term disabled by covid under each of the options.
Although the government was left to choose its own vaccination and lockdown policy, and the VPC's votes were advisory only, the death numbers printed in black and white made it hard for the government to choose the high numbers of deaths.
‘Sociologists have no compelling theory of society’.... ‘philosophers have no compelling theory of knowledge’.... ‘theologians have no compelling theory of religion’... send tweet
For clarity... given some of the replies. I don't actually believe any of those statements. They just illustrate the vacuity of someone [like me] who is obviously not from those disciplines and demonstrates no history of grappling with primary contributions, tweeting out.
'finance has no compelling theory of finance'.... 'banking has no compelling theory of banks'.... 'anthropology has no compelling theory of human behaviour'.... this is fun!