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.
We understand the prime minister well enough by now to know that he lazily speaks his true beliefs before his brain engages, and his remarks to the 1922 Committee reveal his profound ignorance of the efforts of those with an altruism and humanity that he seems incapable of comprehending.
Dr Richard O’Brien
Highbridge, Somerset
• Boris Johnson claims greed and capitalism are behind the partly publicly funded development of a Covid-19 vaccine which is being supplied on a non-profit basis to low-income countries and delivered successfully in the UK by the NHS. Makes you wonder why greed and capitalism and billions of pounds in public funds lavished on Tory allies made such a hash of delivering adequate PPE supplies or an effective test and trace system. Maybe Tories are just rubbish at capitalism?
Chris Webster
Gümligen, Switzerland
