Collective action may be the missing link in the UK’s pandemic performance

As the UK lurched from lockdowns to restrictions throughout 2020-21, many people will have felt as though little progress was being made in the fight against covid-19. We kept returning to the basic public health interventions that had saved lives—encouraging handwashing, physical distancing, and mask wearing.The successes of new treatments for covid-19 and the ongoing vaccination programme point to a key factor missed by successive UK governments in combating the pandemic: the need for collective action. New treatments can be evaluated in robust trials only through the collective efforts of physicians, researchers, research funders, the NHS, and research participants. Vaccinations, too, are best delivered within the collective framework of the NHS.Beyond that, the UK government seemed incapable of transferring these lessons to other aspects of tackling the pandemic. This even extends to ministers’ apparent inability to utter the phrase “collective action” when interviewed about the pandemic. This could be ideological,…
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