In this episode, Dr Kristian Niemietz, Head of Political Economy at the IEA, discusses his explosive new paper Viral Myths: Why we risk learning the wrong lessons from the pandemic with Communications and Marketing Assistant Kieran Neild-Ali. 

The paper dismantles three commonly held assumptions about the pandemic. Firstly, that austerity made the UK unprepared for the virus; secondly that the virus was a crisis of globalisation and finally that the NHS has been the star performer of the pandemic and is beyond reproach.  

Instead, the evidence from Kristian’s paper suggests that nations with lower public spending, open global economies and healthcare systems that do not resemble the NHS did better than the UK in Covid performance indicators.