Sheilagh Ogilvie: preference

Transcript context

…Given all the history you know, what struck you as standing out or surprising or unusual? How do you see the British response differently from how less-informed people might? I was not that happy with the British response while I was living here. There were aspects of it that I continued to be unhappy with until fairly recently. There were things I was very proud of in the sense that the Oxford COVID vaccine got developed really quickly and rolled out really quickly, and I had it, and that was wonderful. Of course, I had just moved to Oxford at the beginning of COVID. I taught for 30 years in Cambridge before I moved to All Souls College. I was starting a new job at the exact time that COVID was starting. I was very pleased that science was kicking in. I think that was something that Britain did fairly well. Some other countries had more delay in approving the early vaccines. On the other hand, one thing I didn’t like was that there were some government initiatives that actually paid people to go out and go to restaurants while the pandemic was still going on. Our then chancellor of the exchequer had a program called Help Out to Eat Out, and he was actually subsidizing people to go out to restaurants while the pandemic was still going on to help business. A very nice piece of econometric analysis was carried out by an economist at Warwick, which showed that immediately after the Eat Out to Help Out initiative was put into place, there were massive increases in COVID infections and deaths in the affected places. I think that was shocking. The other thing that I didn’t like about living here was that it was actually not possible to get a COVID vaccination on the market until last year. You had to wait to come up in the queue of the government deciding whether your age group was allowed to be vaccinated. Whereas, not just in Canada and the United States, but in Germany, in France, all over Europe . . . I had a former postdoc who was saying, “Yes, I’m going on holiday next week. I’ve made an appointment with my GP” — this was in Essen in Germany — “to get my COVID vaccination.” He was just free to do it, whereas the rest of us were waiting for our government permission to get our vaccination. I thought it was a reversal of Britain’s precocious status as the world’s center of variolation in the 18th century. Why was it being like this? It had a really highly market-provided variolation system in the 18th century. Why was it not mobilizing market provision of vaccination in the 21st? You probably have things you remember from living in the US during the COVID pandemic that perhaps weren’t quite the way you might have liked them to be. I drove to North Carolina to get my vaccine a month early, and that worked out great. It was totally legal, to be clear. Federalism has some advantages, referring back to local autonomy.…

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