*Covid policy making*
In May 2020 I was invited on 2 occasions to meet with senior Government officials to discuss the pros and cons of lockdown measures in the UK. As a Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) and policy evaluation expert (who has assessed hundreds of policies for the UK Government) I offered my ongoing advice and input pro bono to the Government, but I never heard back from them. The Government has since then been asked at least 17 times by MPs to conduct a full CBA of #covidー19 policies, but to my understanding this has not happened.
CBA measures the benefits and costs (risks) of a policy for people’s quality of life and is used in all major policy decisions in the UK as mandated by the HM Treasury Green Book. Broadly speaking CBA tells us that we should carry on with something up to the point where the benefits of doing so no longer exceed the costs. When we assess costs we must include the opportunity costs of an action, which are the things we forego as society by expending resources on one particular area. Basically, every $ we spend on health and Covid is a $ we cannot spend on crime, the environment or education and this is a loss to society.
Lockdowns should have stopped at the point where an additional day of #lockdown causes more damage to our society than it benefits us, and #vaccinations should stop at the point where the costs from vaccinating one more person in the UK exceed the benefits of vaccinating. My analysis of the impacts of lockdown last year suggests that we have gone well beyond this threshold for lockdowns and I suspect we are close to it now for vaccines and this is important as society now starts to consider vaccinating children.
Governments have generally taken a very narrow view of the data on Covid when developing policy, focussing on infection and deaths rates and numbers vaccinated but ignoring the costs of our actions and how our resources could have been used elsewhere to potentially greater effect. It has led to one of the greatest oversights in policy making I have ever seen.
This excellent article by Martin Kulldorff also discusses some of these issues and is well worth a read.
https://lnkd.in/dTxsWAY
![The ill-advised push to vaccinate the young]()
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