Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, Dr Richard O’Brien and Chris Webster on Boris Johnson’s remarks to the 1922 Committee
You report (23 March) that Boris Johnson told backbench Conservative MPs that the UK’s successful vaccine rollout was thanks to capitalism and greed. Really? Greedy academics and research scientists? Greedy World Health Organization staff and civil servants? Greedy nurses who give us our jabs? Is that also why contracts given to Tory cronies for test and trace were so startlingly successful? This is not a trivial misunderstanding: it is a fundamental failure to comprehend how modern societies work. Prof Mariana Mazzucato has shown how discovery and innovation flow from the public sector, and there are now studies showing that more equal societies are more innovative, with more patents per head than those where capitalism is rampant.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Colton, North Yorkshire
• I came out of retirement to serve as a vaccinator, and I can attest to the hard work of primary care managers and staff, local government officers, volunteers, GPs, nurses and assistants in driving the vaccination programme. They are motivated entirely by the desire to protect the people in their community, often exhausting themselves to make the mass vaccination programme the success that Boris Johnson claims for his government.
