Vaccine rollout highlights benefits of globalization Business

What events have since shown us is how much interdependence, in fact, makes us more resilient. Most countries, at various stages, suffered from serious internal problems, often due to poor government planning, regulatory failures, spikes in virus transmission, or little protectionism.

But international supply chains have proven to be adaptive and robust, when ultimately it is the vaccine – the manifestation of pan-national integration, resulting from slowly accumulated networks of people, capital and resources. ‘ideas – that will save the day.

As we turn the tide of this crisis, we must not forget or minimize it. The UK Vaccine Task Force can be proud of helping grease the wheels for this week’s achievement. But it is wrong to see the timing of vaccination as an opportunity to push for the relocation of all vaccination capacity, from trials to distribution, on the basis of the alleged downside of ‘dependence’ on it. strangers.

As Britain leading in the distribution of this vaccine has shown, a lack of domestic production capacity is not an obstacle to reaping the benefits of these technologies in the modern world. The deep global market for biotechnology and pharmaceuticals has been a strength for us, not a weakness that requires activist industrial policy to be overcome.

Matt Hancock and US Vice President Mike Pence, who said this week “only in America can you see the innovation that resulted in a vaccine in less than a year,” are right. in a sense – the vaccine owes a lot to British and American innovation.

But the main responsible innovation is the globalized economic market that our countries used to defend. It is a concept, nowadays, often denigrated by politicians and for which the public seems eternally ungrateful.

Ryan Bourne is the R Evan Scharf Chair in Public Understanding of Economics at the Cato Institute