Michael Lewis: ‘We were incentivised to have a bad pandemic response’

"There is no incentive to prevent things," he says. "If you look at what our two societies have in common, we've given ourselves over to markets in a way that's pretty extreme. Which is to say, we strongly encourage things that pay and we give correspondingly less attention to things that don't pay. Prevention does not pay. Disease pays. It pays when Covid is all over society and corporations get to make a lot of money testing for it. It doesn't pay just to shut it down up front. And if there's food for thought, it's that we were essentially incentivised to have a bad pandemic response."

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/may/09/michael-lewis-the-premonition-covid-response-the-big-short-interview