The talk will discuss findings from my just-pre-pandemic book, Regimes of Inequality: The Political Economy of Health and Wealth (Cambridge University Press 2020), to shed light on the causes of cross-national similarities and differences and in social policy responses to Covid-19. Welfare regimes of the trente glorieuses cast long shadows, interacting with place-specific forms of neoliberalism in the 1990s and 2000s to short-circuit efforts to reduce inequalities in health and underlying socioeconomic status. Legacies of these earlier welfare regimes continue to shape governments’ efforts to control health inequalities during the COVID-19 era.