There's a really obvious reason why QE wouldn't have caused consumer price inflation in 2008 and its immediate aftermath: the financial crisis effectively shrunk the money supply. As the Bank of England's economists are fond of explaining, every time a bank writes a loan this creates new money from nowhere and every time a loan is paid off money is destroyed. When the financial crisis hit, banks became unwilling to loan money which meant that businesses couldn't afford to operate and laid off their staff which meant they couldn't afford to buy stuff which meant businesses couldn't afford to operate in an endless loop.
Crucially, though, the actual underlying productive capacity was still there. The factories still existed, the workers and materials they needed were still available, and if only the money was there to run them then they could pay their staff and those staff could buy stuff allowing the businesses to keep operating and making everyone better off once more. This was what QE tried to do, with mixed results and some side effects.
This was not true during Covid. Large chunks of the economy were effectively shut down, their workers forced to stay home and their customers legally barred from buying their products. All the capacity that went unused was basically lost; when factories tried to catch up on production and people went on holidays they'd missed, that came out of 2022 and 2023's capacity and had to compete for it with everything that people would normally have bought. Yet many contries tried to make it seem like people weren't actually worse off due to that long economic shutdown by printing money and handing it out as furlough or enhanced unemployment to replace what they'd have earned for the work they didn't do. That fell apart when the world reopened and they started spending the money because the actual underlying goods and services hadn't been produced.
Crucially, though, the actual underlying productive capacity was still there. The factories still existed, the workers and materials they needed were still available, and if only the money was there to run them then they could pay their staff and those staff could buy stuff allowing the businesses to keep operating and making everyone better off once more. This was what QE tried to do, with mixed results and some side effects.
This was not true during Covid. Large chunks of the economy were effectively shut down, their workers forced to stay home and their customers legally barred from buying their products. All the capacity that went unused was basically lost; when factories tried to catch up on production and people went on holidays they'd missed, that came out of 2022 and 2023's capacity and had to compete for it with everything that people would normally have bought. Yet many contries tried to make it seem like people weren't actually worse off due to that long economic shutdown by printing money and handing it out as furlough or enhanced unemployment to replace what they'd have earned for the work they didn't do. That fell apart when the world reopened and they started spending the money because the actual underlying goods and services hadn't been produced.