Delay is extremely costly in this pandemic. When the post‐mortems are written, lethargy will rank high on the list of consequential policy mistakes. With a rapidly spreading virus, procedural bureaucracy or a failure to grease the wheels for vaccine rollouts will be found to have cost tens of thousands of lives in each advanced country, alongside incalculable damage to livelihoods.
As I explain in my forthcoming book,
Economics In One Virus, governments have certainly spent big on testing, tracing, and vaccines. But the sums are piddling in comparison to the amount allocated for economic relief.
The latter is demanded by voters, but it would have been wiser to put more funds into paying over‐the‐odds to encourage vaccine manufacturing scale‐up, to overcome bottlenecks, and to facilitate around‐the‐clock rollout as soon as vaccines were ready. This would have handsomely paid for itself in a more rapid economic normalisation, not to mention the lives saved. As economist Alex Tabarrok has written, this was the easiest cost‐benefit analysis in the world for policymakers. When the inquiries begin, governments will lament their relative stinginess on spending where it mattered most.