Yesterday I came across an article about some group or another that was upset about the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine. It felt like about the hundredth article I'd read along those lines, and I've finally had it.
Listen up. We were hit by a brand new virus that spread like wildfire throughout the world. Lots of people made lots of mistakes because this was a brand new disaster we were facing. Nevertheless, the actions we took have kept the US death toll down to 0.15% so far, an astonishingly low number. At the same time, pharmaceutical companies employed brand new technology to develop, test, and manufacture hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine within 11 months. Most likely, the entire country (or close enough) will be fully vaccinated within six months even though distribution of the vaccines is wildly complicated thanks to super low temperature storage requirements.
We are living through a damn miracle. But all I ever hear is endless bitching that boils down to whether someone will get a vaccination a week from now vs. four weeks from now. It's stupid not to focus solely on old people first. No, wait, what about essential workers? And what about Black people, who have the highest infection rate? Oh, so now we're going to get all woke about it? I've been trying to get my grandma vaccinated and it took forever! We should be giving people just one dose and not worrying about the second—and everyone at the FDA should be shot for not immediately agreeing about this. Did you know that bus drivers are especially vulnerable to the virus? They should be put at the top of the list. No, teachers should. No, single mothers should. No, poor countries should.
I know this is just human nature, and maybe it's pointless to fight it. But for God's sake, can we stop obsessing over every single thing we think has been unfair, or been done badly, or just gone wrong? Mistakes are part of human nature too. For my money, though, our response to the pandemic—even including all the blunders, all the backtracking, and all the Trump idiocy—has been nothing short of exceptional. If we had managed the Iraq War this well, Iraq would be a fabulous oasis of democracy and economic opportunity blooming in the desert.
UPDATE: I changed the headline from "spectacular" to "pretty good." I admit that "spectacular" was a wee bit too strong.
To add a little more detail, I'd stick to my guns on the vaccine side, which really has been pretty spectacular all the way around. It has suffered from only minor mistakes along the way, mostly of the kind that are inevitable in a big, complex project.
On the general subject of pandemic control, I continue to think we did better than most people think. However, there's no question that we made some serious errors that increased the death toll considerably.
I may write about this again. The reason is that part of my position here came after reading an article in which Lawrence Wright all but said that our pandemic response was the biggest FUBAR in the human history of FUBARs. But his evidence was so laughably weak that it prompted me to write this post.
Plus, of course, the hundredth article in which someone was griping about some group or another being unfairly treated by ignorant and blinkered distribution policies.
Vaccine development has been something like a miracle. The rest of our response to covid has been mediocre to poor.
Correct - the mRNA technique is a remarkable advance in the development of the vaccine itself, and should make it possible to respond really fast in the future. Let's hope that we develop the infrastructure to get the vaccination operation going when it is needed next time. This will take spending and coordination at the federal level - leaving it up to states or just to corporate response is absurd. Our overall response to the virus has been very bad compared to some countries such as South Korea and New Zealand (it's not just the oriental mentality) who got testing, isolation, etc. organized. Unfortunately many other countries did as badly as we did. And again on vaccine distribution some countries (UK, Israel) have done much better and many worse. Is our politicians learning from all this, or we going to face the same screwups next time?
Yep. Medical science truly does spectacular things. And much of that science is generated in the United States. But the country's ability to keep its own people alive through this crisis has been weaker -- usually considerably weaker -- than just about every other high income country.
I'm grateful there's light at the end of the tunnel. But the aftermath of this pandemic calls for sober reflection in America. Not confetti.
mRNA-based vaccines were developed over decades, from theory to developing the means and methods. Which of course points to the benefits of federal spending on R&D, amirite?
Very good point!
socialism! how dare you!!!!
Bingo!
It really is a combination of investments, from PCR through CRISPR, including Human Genome Project, etc., that got us to this point too. Not to mention the numerous academic labs that pivoted to testing, which has helped a lot.
Someone on my Facebook was livid that the local county health board cancelled their vaccine clinic today due to the snowstorm. I want everyone to be vaccinated quickly, too, but making people wait a few more days to prevent lots of elderly people from trying to drive in bad road conditions is a heck of a lot safer and smarter than barreling ahead. People need to keep the risks in perspective. (And right now our county numbers are very low again.)
In my county they proceeded with the Saturday appointment at the county government center despite the fact that we were under an ice storm warning. So my sister braved the ice to get my elderly parents there in her Subaru. Then a long sidewalk to get from the drop off to the entrance, a volunteer pushed my dad in a wheelchair and my sister let mom hang on to her as they inched along.
The immediate situation of the storm aside, this has been a real concern. It’s difficult to get to where you need to go, you’re surrounded by people (which makes me uncomfortable). LA County has been setting up its main vaccine “MEGA-PODS” as drive through and it’s brilliant. Stay safe in the car the whole time. It’s what everyone should be doing as much as possible.
i live in florida. a local woman was outraged when her appointment at a regional grocery/pharmacy chain was cancelled because of bad weather. bad weather, she roared, what bad weather? this is florida. the weather's fine here. the bad weather that kept the vaccine from getting to florida. that bad weather.
i also saw interviewed a 90-year-old woman who walked six miles through bad weather to get hers and thought nothing of it.
While I agree overall, I feel I'm much more tolerant of the complaining and the angsting. For one thing, the freedom to complain and gripe is fundamental to the nature of the country we are in. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom to say only nice things.
For another, this is the biggest, most life-changing thing that has happened in my lifetime. It has had the most impact on how I conduct my daily life, easily. It's not as big an impact as WWII was for the people who lived through it, but it's the biggest for me, and for most people alive now.
And it's wearing on us, in subtle ways. Withdrawal of physical social contact turns out to take a toll in subtle ways. We miss it. It affects our mood, our sense of well-being.
This is hard, harder than it might seem. We are doing it, as you say. It's pretty amazing, and yay for all the people getting it done.
As to the issues of just how we prioritize distribution, I just remember that there's probably no right way to do it, though there are a lot of wrong ways.
I'm not a rock-thrower much. I think it spoils my own mood too much to get caught up in that stuff. But I could see wondering why we prioritize THIS instead of THAT or THEM over THOSE.
Love ya, Kevin. Hang in there. We'll get there.
The bit stained wretches have to have something to write about. As I understand, the wretches don't get to write the head lines for their stories. Not having some click bait story is like the horror of dead air in radio and TV.
In my neck of the woods the complaints are due to the haphazard initial rollout, not really the fault of the local government or even the state government who were doing the best they could but the lack of transparency in allocation of doses and a few technical snafus with the signup websites for the county and CVS who got the additional "extra" doses from the feds left many highly frustrated.
How can Kevin write a piece like this? Soon 500k people in the USA will be dead due to COVID-19 and we have even higher unemployment than the worst part of the Great Recession. How can he call the the USA’s response to COVID-19 “spectacular” when various other countries have done so much better than the USA, ie China, Taiwan, Laos, Vietnam, South Korea, Australia, Japan, and Canada?
Yes, it can only be explained by that typical American navel-gazing approach to self assessment. So many other countries with so much better responses but self assessment says "spectacular"
"We were hit by a brand new virus that spread like wildfire throughout the world."
No it didn't - look up Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, Japan ... yes well they're all islands, of course, just like Britain and Ireland are. And even America is a kind of island: unless hoards of the infected cross the Canadian and/or Mexican borders, America is, in all meaningful respects, an island.
an island with dozens and dozens of points of entry. i'll give taiwan, new zealand et al credit for a job well done but their degree of difficulty was far less than what we faced.
we had an idiot as president who acted late and poorly when he did, no doubt costing lives. but we did have government at other levels who filled the breach as best they could. i don't have stats to back this up, only my guess, but in my state we had city and county leaders impose restrictions such as mandatory mask-wearing, when our trump-loving governor in his infinite wisdom didn't see fit to act, thus saving lives.
let's remember that even in early summer experts were saying it would take 12 to 18 months at minimum to develop, test and approve a vaccine. we had shots in arms six months later.
Maybe Kevin's viewpoint is colored by the fact that Kevin and Marin have gotten the Vaccine already due to age/vulnerability?
Meanwhile those of us in our 50s are going to have to wait awhile even folks at higher risk as there doesn't seem to be enough doses to widen distribution and it's looking like it will be months not weeks until that changes.
Or maybe he's pointing out what not responding at all would have done.
The avoidance of further misery doesn't make the current miserly any less. We should be grateful we're not living Texas, it sounds like hell on earth there right now. I remember how bad it was when my gas service shut down due to a bad valve and that was only 2 days without heat.
I feel bad for them,too. But Texas is also one of the few states that has control over its power grid and infrastructure. They have low taxes and maximum “freedom” but rampant deregulation and minimal spending on public goods.
Naturally, because I remember how deeply committed Texas was to helping out Californians during our time of need, there’s a part of me that says left the bastards freeze. But I don’t have the heart for it. We are our brothers keeper after all.
As a Californian who remembers Enron people,saying “burn baby burn” in response to California wildfires causing power grid problems, I’m sorry, but I can’t help feeling a bit of Schadenfreude. But mostlyI agree with Mitch Guthman.
Orange County Republican gonna Republican.
"Nevertheless, the actions we took have kept the US death toll down to 0.15% so far, an astonishingly low number."
Please, 0.15% is nothing to brag about. Compared to most Western European countries it's about average, i.e. mediocre. But when you start looking around the world, it's really catastrophic. Japan, whose population is even older than ours, has a mortality rate of 0.0045%. And Taiwan has 0.0004%.
Western civilization has performed atrociously in this epidemic. The US is about average among these failing responses. But on a global scale, it's disastrous and embarrassing.
(To be clear, the vaccines are not the issue in our terrible performance: it's our awful performance with regard to non-pharmacological interventions, which were grossly inadequate from the start and have remained so, or even deteriorated, over time.)
I agree. There have been many countries that have risen to the occasion but we are most definitely not among that number. What’s more under both GW Bush and Obama this country was considered to be the absolute best prepared to detect a pandemic early and to mobilize heaven and earth in response. The United States was the “gold standard”.
The federal government and a large number of states decided to just ride out the plague and do nothing or less than nothing. Even the states that tried (California, NY) sacrificed every bit of their early success to open the bars and nightclubs and tattoo parlors instead of schools.
I can’t think of one American state that’s performed as well as Germany or France or Denmark. Even Italy understood what needed to be done and as made a lot of progress.
The highly effective response of most of the more developed nations in the Asia/Pacific region was, I believe, mostly a consequence of their applying the lessons they learned in earlier outbreaks of infectious respiratory diseases, particularly SARS-Cov1 . They were prepared with PPE, masks, and action plans for testing, contact tracing, isolating and quarantining, monitoring travelers, and more. The US had an action plan, and a stockpile of equipment, developed in the wake of the 'swine flu' epidemic, but the stockpile was not maintained, and the plan was not followed. We will never know how many lives could have been saved if that effort had been continued and expanded, but we hope that going forward that we follow through this time.
I agree with your point about APAC learning lessons from SARS-Cov1. We've now been through a far worse virus. Do you think the USA has learned similar lessons and will react better with the next one, the probability of which seems to be near 1.0? Do you think the freedumb lovers in GQP will don masks the next time?
Vaccine development and rollout could be, IMO, viewed as “spectacular”. Our country’s response to Covid, not so much.
I guess we are at the point of meta-crabbing about crabbing about the crisis. The miracle is that it took us a year to get here!
And humans continue to attempt to determine who among them is the biggest victim of the others via highly ritualized whining. I guess everything is more or less OK.
Nah. Continuous public oversight of the process, or "endless bitching" if you prefer, is the only thing keeping the vaccines from being distributed on the basis of money and privilege. I hope we keep it up.
Good point, though I'd imagine that President Biden as long as he has congress on his side would never ever let that happen.
The privileged already are jumping the queue. For example, Biden and Harris were both vaccinated very early on. Biden is entitled to high priority due to his age, but Harris's age group won't be getting vaccinated for a couple of months yet. If you're vice-president, you don't have to wait your turn.
You've never been one to troll to get readers, BUT are you kidding me?! "Liberate Michigan!"? Hydroxcholorquine? The China Virus? It will disappeare? No coherent federal response and the response that we had was undermined by messages that encouraged people to do whatever they liked or felt they could make a statement by doing?
I like the new site. Much easier to read. The graphics work better. But things like this make me wonder if having an editor wasn't helpful.
...And so twice as many died as if we had a better response.
But we also will stop this disease this year.
I’m not as hopeful about that as I once was. There’s huge parts of this country that won’t work to contain the virus and are actively working on creating ideal conditions for its spread. And this states likely aren’t going to be very proactive on distribution of the vaccine, either.
I think it will likely abate somewhat over the summer but it isn’t going away in this country like it will in the more advanced countries. I think the next step will be vaccine passports and vaccination cards like the yellow ones I used to get as a boy. Couldn’t go to countries with primitive public health systems without all the proper inoculations.
It will be interesting to see what happens in States like South Dakota. And, more locally, whether people in Central California bother getting vaccinated.
The situation with the vaccine is very troubling. I’m now seeing estimates that we would need upwards of 80% being vaccinated or having some level of immunity from having had the virus. They should be able to hit that target in most of Europe and Asia but I don’t see it happening in this country.
What’s more, I heard an interesting interview with an immunologist who was worried about mutations in places that are unable or unwilling to control the virus. The concern, if I understood correctly, is that when the virus is replicating in really huge numbers the chance of mutations increases, as does the chance of a mutation that defeats the immunity conferred by a vaccine or having had a case of Covid-19.
It’s just another example of the way that freedom in this country is a zero sum game. And the rights of individuals trump the needs of the people. It turns out that the conservatives were wrong when they insisted that the constitution isn’t a suicide pact.
Twice depends on whom we're making comparisons with.
I can't comment on how well or badly America responded to the pandemic. All I can say is that in Australia, we've had 909 deaths to date. If our death rate had been the same as America's, we would have lost about 36,000. And nobody here would have been hailing it as a miracle of public health administration.
...Because you'd be expecting to remain in fear of the disease for how long?
I think that depends. Partly on how well the first world manages to mobilize resources to vaccinate everyone else. And partly, if you're an American, on how well the federal government mobilizes to force states to take measures to suppress the virus and to require vaccinations.
If we can't do these things, I would expect everyone to remain in fear of the virus for a very long time. Maybe not as afraid as we were of smallpox but unless we suppress the virus and vaccinate at least 80% of our population (whether they're willing or not), there's a very good chance that Covid-19 will persist for decades (perhaps as a reoccurring pandemic and perhaps—if we're lucky—as a sort of seasonal flu+).
Our response to using science to develop world-changing vaccines has indeed been spectacular. Our response to distributing the vaccines has been decent, but not communicated very well. Our response to developing medical solutions to treating those with severe Covid has been very good. Our response as a country in developing strategies to reduce the spread of Covid has been very good after a haphazard start. But, our ability as a country to follow those strategies and thus reduce Covid spread and death has been poor, thanks to the previous administration and too much personal selfishness disguised as “liberty”.
Obviously the virus is complex and has impacted different populations in vastly different ways not necessarily related to how well they responded. And no doubt the 'disastrous response narrative is overplayed. But just a couple of simple high level data points at least suggest that Kevin's take here is maybe a little optimistic. I'm Canadian, thus the comparison to Canada's mortality rate, which has benefitted from a coordinated federal/provincial response (we've had our better and worse provinces for sure) from close to the outset.
- US population as a % of world population: 4.25%
- US covid deaths as a % of reported world covid deaths: 20.2%
- US Covid deaths: 487,794
- US Covid deaths if the US had the same Covid mortality rate as Canada: 182,801
Dr Schaffer of Vanderbilt University on Nicole Wallace's MSNBC program today specifically pointed to the far more sensible responses of Australia's and New Zealand's than America's to this Coronavirus epidemic. Their deaths per capita and their resultant low level of hospitalization expenditures are irrefutable evidence that hundreds of thousands of more Americans would still be alive today.
You've not included Australia among your daily COVID-19 deaths rates charts, but I had just assumed that you reckoned a country that's dealing with a population of only 26 million wasn't sufficiently large to be comparing with one that has nearly 330 million.
However, your propounding that Trump and like-minded politicians out in the states and townships had dealt with this pandemic with an acceptable level of competence is a quantum leap into fallacious misinformation. I'd go so far as to characterize it as bordering on unthoughtfulness.
From reading your viewpoints for many years at "Mother Jones", one can't help but form an impression of a singularly intelligent and caring person who has been well worth the time spent hearing you almost every day. Ruefully, therefore, this "regular" reader won't be returning.
I would urge you to stay or at least to continue to visit occasionally. Like you, I’ve often been critical of Kevin’s Panglossian tendencies. He really is an incurable optimist who likes to see the best in even the worst of people.
But, as you say, year after year Kevin delivers more than his fair share of intelligent discussion and critical analysis. This post is certainly one of his major clunkers (perhaps almost up there with Hillary has won Florida and the election is over)but on the whole it’s just a minor blemish on a quite good record. So, I think you should reconsider.
I think KD, as everyone should be, is astounded at the very fact we are where we are almost a year after the dam broke.
It is just short of a miracle. The literal programming of the immune system via designed RNA.
The development of the vaccine was indeed extremely impressive. But everything else about this country’s response to the pandemic has been nothing short of catastrophically incompetent and disastrous. There’s hundreds of thousands of people who are dead that shouldn’t be dead.
From the last lunar new year until this lunar new year we have completely screwed up every aspect of fighting this pandemic. And I’m not just talking about Donald Trump, either. California’s response has been pathetic; we did a good early start and then for reasons that completely escaped me we opened up the bars, the massage parlors, the casinos, the tattoo parlors—we just gave up and that’s why California and the rest of the country isn’t back to normal like Australia, New Zealand, Korea, China, Singapore, etc.
But I'm pointing out what I believe KD is referencing, where would be without this trifling achievement?
I'm not discounting the failures, nor do I believe KD is. But it's like watching Alan Shepard in March then watching Neil Armstrong next February. It's incredible.
If that's what Kevin's impressed with, he's being illogical. Two of the three main vaccines were developed abroad. The country really didn't participate or even strongly support the development of these vaccines.
More to the point, our "spectacular" response is quite possibly going to render the vaccines ineffective in the fairly near future as the virus continues to rage out of control in most of the country. And even by Kevin's standard, surely the wonder drugs are just as wonderful outside of our borders and perhaps just a bit more wonderful in countries that are actually taking the pandemic seriously.
Is this where Donald Trump goes for his apology?
Apparently. Sheesh.
It was the most spectacular of pandemic response. Evidently even witnessing Donald Trump's great cruelty and the fecklessness of nearly every elected official or senior advisor on the pandemic, Kevin's optimism persists because "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds."
“But for God's sake, can we stop obsessing over every single thing we think has been unfair, or been done badly, or just gone wrong?”
HA HA !
oh, that’s a good one.
But seriously, what else would everyone do with their time? Twitter, for one thing, would basically cease to exist under those circumstances .....
I wasn't even a twinkling in my father's eye during Mercury, Gemini, Apollo - so I'm asking: was there the same bitching?
That was a rhetorical question.
Yes there was. Why weren't we spending the money wasted on these moon mission things, instead of the poor? NASA is part of the Military-Industrial Complex, so it's EVIL. The complaints didn't stop until the US stopped going to the moon, or really, anywhere. But the poor are still with us and the m-i-complex has gotten even more complex.
What you're seeing is the discussion we should have been having six to ten months ago, not in the middle of the vaccine campaign. The issues being discussed were easily understood long before the pandemic hit us; we just never took the time to seriously talk about it because the big guy in charge at the time, created chaos beyond just COVID-19.
Do we care about parity or efficiency? Do we focus on the most vulnerable or the most important?
These ethical and moral issues didn't just pop up yesterday; these are long-standing dilemmas that ethicists care about deeply, and in vain, tried to get us to have these conversations a long time ago.
No one in the media cared enough to talk about it; not even your colleagues at MoJo brought up vaccine distribution concerns. I tried to talk about it but no one seemed to care.
That we're seeing complaints about distribution now, well, that's on everyone who didn't care to talk about it last year when we had the chance to iron out priority.
A response to a disease that only kills people over 80 and falls sharply at a downward esculation from 80-65 from? It doesn't hurt that silent generation morons were some of the biggest bozos ever.
For the first time in Kevin's posting life, I feel the commenters have given the big lie to the post itself. It's almost funny, I was reminded of when one of my exceptional employees always bitches and moans about doing this and that (in spite of working his butt off) and just me turning the tables by behaving like them was enough to turn them in a completely stable, rational person!!! Something like that is happening here.
But, I must admit, in addition to the poster, the commenters' quality here is exceptional. In other blogs, you have to wade through a million comments to find a gem/exceptional comment, but not so here.
As for my comment, I have been in both places (complained/amazed), so I am with the idea that that is the price of freedom. I just wish that some of the reporters kept some perspective when reporting and not write as if their view of the world is hundert percent correct. We are like the blind people feeling an elephant for the first time with this virus.
--r
No. Why?
Because I don't want to die from this (and I will if I get it) and each day this goes on, the chance becomes greater. I will slip or a spouse will be ordered into work (because work should be done at the office apparently even if it can be done grom home) catch it there and spread it to me.
So no. I will never stop trying to make it better, faster than it is. Enjoy your cushy retirement.
Kevin
We were caught in an unusual situation
We had a deadly disease that has or will shortly kill 500,000 Americans
Yet, we had people who believed it to be a hoax
'We had people who refused to wear masks
We had people who refused to stay home
We had people who took unknown and dangerous quack cures
We had more than normal numbers of people now saying they won;t get vaccinated
But you claim the 0.15% death rate was "astonishingly low"
Given our technological prowess. Our medical laboratories
Our exceptions colleges and universities
Our wide spread availability to access the internet
NOW you claim 500,000 deaths astonishingly low?
Get real Kevin. We are a nation of rumor mongers with the majority of this nations population NOT college educated. We have fallen for our own success story and morphed it into something else.
We believe the things we WANT to believe because it feeds our collective ego's. We are a nation that prefers to be MIS informed over being RIGHT
Let me ask a question here since I'm old enough to remember this stuff.
How much MIS information would there be out there had there been NO internet here in the U.S.? How many of us would have taken the time to go the library, done the research, learned about pandemics and then gone home, got on the phone and started telling our friends and family the TRUTH?
The internet has turned us into armchair experts and it fits into our believe in American exceptionalism
You are blatantly wrong about our death rate. Anyone who celebrates 500,000 killed or 0.15% death rate while claiming we are the best in the world at everything needs to get their head examined
Again, 500,000 of aging sick people. Many were already close to death. Kevin is beating around the bush and just admit it: Covid does not kill much.
If only...
Let me guess: you're a millennial. If someone over 65 suffocates to death surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits, eh, so what? What's the big deal? Should just herd 'em into pens and walk away, let nature take care of itself. Sound about right?
I say: Keep your hair on!
It is true that there is some unjustified complaining going on. To counter that by saying "our performance has been spectacular" is almost beyond absurd.
On vaccination we are not doing too badly; better than the EU. If you look at the "best" performers though it turns out that they all did a national-egotism strategy. While the EU bureaucrats were negotiating how to do an internationally coordinated vaccination campaign Boris, Trump and Netanyahu jumped the line and grabbed all the early supply. Not my definition of "good performance"!
Only the US has the war powers act (by the historic accident of the Korean War). They could have used it to improve the situation for everybody--for example by ensuring necessary supplies for vaccine manufacturing, from syringes to specific chemicals that are required in unprecedented amounts for new-technology vaccines. Nobody in "Operation Warpspeed" apparently planned that far ahead, the "operation" was just bullying/bribing the industry to hurry up development, a good thing but a thing that Trump actually understands.
So, no, we were not being spectacular, we were well below expectations given that we were better set up than even the Europeans to manage this, largely due to the sheer size of the country and our relatively low population density (compared to most of Europe and all of East Asia) but also we have the CDC (adequately funded until Trump arrived).
China's, Taiwan's, S Korea's, Vietnam's response to Covid 19 has been spectacular.
Having been in SE Asia at the start of this pandemic, I've seen spectacular responses to this pandemic, and we ain't it. Now that it's kicked our butts and we we haz a new prez, we have picked up our act.
Sorry Kevin but did some MAGA wingnut hacked your blog? Calling the US response to COVID 19 Spectacular is up there with "Mission Accomplished" in the most deluded self pats in the back.
Even you were calling Trump an idiot back in August asking if he was really this deluded or simply lying when he was making similar claims to yours, and things have only gotten worse since then, so even by your previous standards you should realize that what you are saying is utterly false.
Yes, there have been some bright spots, like the speed at which the vaccines were developed, but the science behind them was already there, which is why the vaccine developers have expressed that even if modifications become necessary due to virus mutations, the turn around would be fairly quick. As others have mentioned, it's also worth noting that the vaccine development hasn't been just a USA effort. Their response (the vaccine developers) was indeed spectacular, as was the response of doctors, nurses, and everyone who did their best to treat patients sick with a new disease, even in the face of equipment shortages, lack of support from authorities, and a large chunk of the population who seemed hell bent on making their work even harder just out of political spite, but that's about it.
Every other aspect about the response to the pandemic has been from mediocre at best to awfully bad starting with the lack of a national strategy to deal with it and the constant downplaying of the problem; the conflicting messages from people in charge at all levels; the intentional push to make States compete with each other for supplies and support instead of working collaboratively; the disregard for safety in the zeal to keep the economy going as a campaign talking point; the direct and explicit support and encouragement for people disregarding even the most basic measures to keep the spread in check from the President, and some Governors and local officials. Even the numbers you flaunt as spectacular aren't really great compared to many other nations, as the man who for the last year has made daily charts about it should know.
Well, not to beat the biggest dead horse in the room, but didn't we just finish with a completely inadequate, criminal response to the virus over the entire year since the virus appeared, and shouldn't we take that into account less than one month into a new administration?
I think people are pretty justified with their dissatisfaction with the present state of the response of government to the virus.
No, the Iraq invasion would not have been a great success with better management, let alone the poor management that we actually got with covid. Installing a stable democracy was a hopeless task because of the internal divisions in the country. This had actually been recognized clearly at the time of the Bush I war by Cheney, among others. Once we destabilized the country, all sorts of things were more or less bound to happen. If we had put millions of troops in the country and really clamped down things might not have been so bad, but that was never a possibility. If we had really devoted huge resources and government control to covid - as China did - that outcome would have been different, but we didn't.
Mr. Drum just will not be dissuaded from his current "Everything is fine, actually" stance on pretty much every issue.