I agree with your take that the impact on America could have been much smaller in all sorts of scenarios, including just taking it more seriously sooner (like during the time frame that you're recounting).

I'm not sure that the travel ban from China in particular would have significantly affected the course of the pandemic in the U.S. We now know that COVID is very often totally asymptomatic and that it had already spread to many countries (possibly including the U.S.) by January of last year. People arriving from countries other than China could easily have introduced it into the U.S., and very possibly did (and certainly have many times since then). The U.S. didn't have the testing or tracing or quarantine capabilities to control the transmission of the epidemic in the community.

This skepticism is not meant to take away from your other points, which all seem right to me. I think many other kinds of responses (or awareness or understanding on the part of the American public) could have had a big effect last January or February. The responses, awareness, and understanding we actually got were terrible.

At this time they were trying to eject him from office on the most ridiculous of basis. Nearly all of the media and all of government was focused on damaging him. Because of this they could not bring themselves to line up behind him and follow his lead.

Think about that for a moment. Love or hate Trump, in that moment, early next year, the right move for the nation --not for politicians and the media-- would have been to say: "Mr. President, what do you want us to do. We are 100% with you."

The media, in particular, could have been far more useful to the nation and the world. Instead of focusing on their usual nonsense and web of lies they could have engaged in real journalism and delivered actionable information.

Instead of NY and San Francisco politicians saying things like "everything is OK, it's just the flu, go to festivals, get in the subway, etc." they should have contacted the White house for actionable intelligence on why they were sounding the alarm as they did.

Remember that at the same time Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx where on TV telling us a tsunami was coming, New York officials (and our current President and VP) were saying this was racist, xenophobic and nothing to worry about.

Like I said, I hope historians paint the entire picture and do so with the truth.

The Trump administration IS the US government; he staffed the CDC, he controlled the messaging, he denied repeatedly that COVID was serious. It's not his public manner or communication skills that did the damage, it's his outright lying and deception that he and his administration did on a daily basis. Just because he was right about imposing a travel ban doesn't make up for the complete failure of his administration.

That's what you wrote. I'm not distorting anything. You seem to want to limit Trump's responsibility to his communication skills. He owned COVID, it was his administration, his Cabinet, the GOP controlled Senate, his CDC where he installed a leader that had huge question marks even before the pandemic. It was assigning his son in-law to the COVID task force. It was his touting quack solutions because he lacked the critical thinking to actually listen to medical professionals.

"Prior administrations" had issued warnings about the potential for this type of pandemic. Warnings that were ignored. (Echoes of 9/11).

You can claim I'm distorting your message, but your message is incoherent and ignoring the facts.

The NYT has gone down this path far further than I would have thought possible. The WSJ is now owned by Murdoch so its less surprising that their news reporting has also slipped. Those are the two best. By a margin.

There's a massive problem that isn't being talked about because "Them! They're evil! Just look at what they say about..."

edit: I did something similar stocking up based on the Guardian (yeah, not an ideal source) reporting that a woman from Wuhan crossed the country with no symptoms for Chinese New Year and gave the virus to her whole family. She never had symptoms. I thought at that point, this is on, there's a non-negligible chance this will not be contained, so get prepared.

And, yes, we have to be fair and clearly state that Trump was a complete moron in the way he handled some aspects of this. As an example, I cannot understand why he had such a problem with masks.

I can't even imagine the reasons other than to look at it from my background in manufacturing. This is what I think could have happened: The administration quickly understood we don't even make the cloth necessary to make masks. The US and Europe could not manufacture ANY of the safety equipment we needed for this pandemic at scale back in January of last year. We didn't even make the machines that make the masks.

Telling the public to go get masks would have resulted in a mess and panic. I get that possibility. Here's what they should have done: Figure out how people could DIY some level of protection and widely publish this. Trump should have gone on TV and told people the truth: We can't make enough masks. They are important. This is what you have to do while we sort this out. Instead he engaged in stupid battles with the media. That was dumb, unnecessary, and, yes, it likely cost lives too.

All that said, we are vaccinating at a rate of over a million people per day today because of what the Trump administration set in motion a year ago. They pushed for and succeeded at having multiple vaccines developed in the span of eight months. Something never before done in the history of humanity. And yet he/they were vilified for the stupid shit he did in front of the cameras and, to some extent, rightly so in my opinion.

This was a year in which both our politicians and our news media failed us in monumental ways. Both of these groups lied to us. And the consequences were deadly. I hope historians get this one right.

You might want to look at some of the late 18th century pamphlets and newspapers that were the "press" of which the American founders aimed to protect the freedom -- the American revolutionaries' cause spread partly through pamphlets, so they were very sympathetic to the medium. These publications were not only extremely partisan, but they often abounded in personal insults and rage far beyond anything one would see in a modern newspaper. No, the Founders were very comfortable with sensationalism and extreme polemic.

Two scenarios:

First: "Please develop a vaccine for us. Go quickly. Invest massive amounts of money and resources. We might buy some from you. If someone else comes up with it first, we'll buy from them."

Second: "Here's an irrevocable order for two billion US dollars for a product we need you to develop immediately. Go! Go! Go!".

No business with risk it all under the first scenario. It would be suicidal.

The second scenario. One where you are given guaranteed payment for a result as well as everything else that goes with it (lowering regulatory barriers, fast-track FDA action, help in mass manufacturing and organizing mass distribution, etc.). Yeah, the second scenario is vastly different.

Put it in terms of a startup. Imagine going to a VC and saying "I have this idea but no clue if anyone will buy it", vs. "I have this idea and I have this irrevocable US government order for two billion dollars of my product and all the support I need to make it happen quickly". Which one of the two do you think will get funded in a microsecond?

Yeah. That's the difference.

In any case, the question at hand was whether or not the US admin funded Pfizer, and it did not. It gave them assurances, but so did many other entities ( like the EU), so the US really cannot be hailed as some sort of visionaries that made the vaccines possible with their generous help ( which was what GP was claiming).

Without that pre-order, they had no guarantee that they would get any money. What if their vaccine turned out to be 50% effective? 30%?

You said that the administration should have funded vaccine development. They offered funding and were declined. They also funded J&J and Moderna, and provided purchase guarantees for Pfizer when they weren't allowed to fund it. In other words, the plethora of vaccines that we have is in part thanks to the actions of the administration.

What, specifically, are you suggesting they should have done that they didn't with regard to funding?

Edit: there are innumerable things we can point to that the Trump administration did wrong during the pandemic that made things worse. We don't need to invent new ones that are easily disproved.

I don't know why you're signaling out NY politicians, who, as stupid as they were with the initial handling, at least changed course when they understood - many others across the US refused to do so well in the pandemic, when it was painfully obvious how contagious and deadly the virus is.

I'm sorry, the conclusion that the travel ban was racially motivated is just laughable.

I am singling out NY politicians because they likely seeded the entire nation with this virus at a massive scale when they took political sides rather than come into alignment with what the Trump administration was saying.

You can literally search for and find videos from exactly the same dates going back to January, February and March to confirm this. The Trump Administration was sounding the alarm. Every time Trump or the team would go on TV politicians from New York, Pelosi and Schummer and others would get in front of a camera to oppose it and tell the public everything was fine.

I focus on NY officials because they are likely responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths across the nation. Someone would have to trace the path the virus took in the US. Based on the timeline I would not be surprised if almost every single outburst traces to New York and San Francisco, but mostly NY. That's certainly the case for adjoining states and, I believe, Florida.

WHO were slow in some regards ( e.g. masks, but it's not like it would have made any positive difference when there simply weren't enough masks available even for medical personnel, let alone the general public), and it's their job to fight pandemics, but they're not "responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths". It's a novel virus, vastly more contagious ( even when asymptomatic), and especially due to China's initial botched response information was slow to tricke, and even when the WHO said stuff, issued warnings, gave counsel many countries outright ignored them, with some like the US deciding to withhold funding to fuck with the WHO in the middle of a fucking pandemic instead of listening to them.

> You can literally search for and find videos from exactly the same dates going back to January, February and March to confirm this. The Trump Administration was sounding the alarm. Every time Trump or the team would go on TV politicians from New York, Pelosi and Schummer and others would get in front of a camera to oppose it and tell the public everything was fine.

Are you sure? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eB_xCk5ABw, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuVo4fnpLC8 and similar ( you might say those are biased sources, but they show actual footage of him talking nonsense with dates, so if they're wrong, it should be pretty easy to debunk), and my own memory, and everything i've ever seen on the subject was exactly the opposite - Trump desperately trying to sweep it under the rug and saying that everything is fine, everything is under control. He continued to do so well after NY was in pandemic response mode, with makeshift morgues(!) to handle all the dead. Do you recall Cuomo's big speech about how states are bidding against each other for PPE and ventilators, and Trump's and Kushner's response that the federal stockpile is theirs, and they don't buy it that states suddenly need more PPE and ventilators?

Trump, at least to me, revealed himself as being in a range between incompetent to a moron when it came to effective communication with the public. One of our (sadly) favorite daily events was "Let's see what stupid shit Trump is going to say today". This did not help. This was deadly.

this was made worse by a Democratic party and mass media that chose to be at war with him in the middle of a world-wide pandemic. They were literally trying to eject him from office. How could have have possibly been a good idea at all?

Instead of everyone aligning for the common good they divided further and further, to the detriment of all. I place that blame 100% on the hands of the Democratic party and 100% on the part of the leftist media who support them blindly. To behave this way in the middle of a pandemic was pure bullshit and people lost their lives because of it. Trump had no control over the war that was being waged against him. Democrats could have (and should have) chosen to stop with the nonsense and focus on what actually mattered. They wasted our time and resources with impeachment right as this thing was exploding. Love or hate Trump, the truth of the matter is that when you have missiles coming down on your cities your fucking unite, no matter what, or we all die.

The foundational issues exposed by this pandemic were many. At the core, I think, is the reality that the US system of government isn't centralized. The most significant impact of this is that the US President (regardless of who it might be) or the Federal Government cannot, by law tell the states what to do. In other words, the US President cannot mandate mask usage, or staying at home, etc. The United States of America is more like a bunch of divided countries, each agreeing to some common frameworks and each telling the other states and the federal government "fuck you, you can't tell me what to do". The pandemic brought that to the forefront full force. Again, to our detriment.

Vaccine distribution is another issue. The federal government cannot mandate how to distribute the vaccine. They can recommend and setup systems, but the states have full autonomy on this front and can't be forced into anything at all.

Yes, amendments can be passed, but they require 2/3 of the House, Senate and State Legislatures to agree. This is difficult during normal times. Given the political war these bodies were fighting at the time, this was impossible.

The structural problems with the US Constitution continue with such issues as an imperfect freedom of the press right that allows the press to lie at will and become political activists in a fight. If you don't agree with this, just imagine a scenario where 95% of the press is 100% aligned with the Right to get a sense of what this nightmare scenario looks like to anyone interested in the truth and balance. We should not allow that to every happen in this country, yet it is exactly what we have today, with the left in full control of a vast portion of the media. Not sure how we fix it. We have to find a way.

This is no different from the right to firearms. We need to fix this shit (speech and firearms), it's crazy.

We also need to purge political ranks with solid term limits. The level of ignorance in Congress is staggering. This is an environment where people who would not make it in the private domain can become millionaires and have decades-long careers by simply pandering for votes. It's sick and we are all paying for the consequences of this travesty. The only system that has proven to deliver results in the private domain ought to somehow be adapted to government: Meritocracy, performance, results, delivering on promises, etc.

We have a political system where, every election, politicians tell us how they are going to fix healthcare, education, gun laws, unemployment, immigration and inequality. They have been saying these things for, I don't know, at least fifty years. Republican, Democrat, it doesn't matter. They are all a bunch of pandering incompetent imbeciles who have somehow managed to stay in power while driving this nation backwards. We need term limits and we need a merit-based system that rewards actual performance, not lies and manipulation.

The pandemic was the perfect storm that exposed just how fucked we are. If people don't wake up and fix this by voting intelligently and applying political pressure nothing will change and it will only get better. I mean, look at where we are now. This is hardly evidence of long term competence.

If nothing else, this has showed movies to be far removed fron reality. I imagine in hollywood, the US government takes something like a virus of questionable origin quite seriously. Not just because it can kill you but because it might mutate and a deadly strain might surface and do the real damage.

The real response was hard to fathom for most of the world. How can the most powerful nation on earth struggle so badly? More so since we live in the digitally connected age where data is plenty. Does this mean if we had an alien invasion they'd dysfunction as bad as they did? Its outrageous really.

Being prepped and having the financial muscle to buy supplies for months in advance is well and good but most people arent in such good financial terms. Therefore prepping is a function of time and money where money is the determining factor.

Not a lot of people have a lot of money. As much as they'd like to get into the practice anti-fragility, the economics disagrees with them

The virus uncovered political dysfunction in ways nothing else could have achieved.

It also showed the world the state of decimation of the industrial bases of the US, Europe and nearly every nation on the planet. The fact that the US and Europe could not make masks and protective equipment because we don't even make the cloth or the machinery required to manufacture these things at scale was a shocking revelation for anyone not in manufacturing.

I think this is one of the reasons for which I reacted so quickly. Aside from having the means, I have been manufacturing things for three decades and have see exactly how badly our supply chain and capabilities have eroded. I want to say that I instinctively knew that a pandemic would likely cause massive shortages due to our lack of mass manufacturing capacity. It also helps that I spent a good deal of my life in Latin America. I remember my parents buying huge sacks of flour, sugar and other things as the economy faltered around them.

Problem is, that's not true!

For this and other reasons, I am a strong supporter or term limits. Politicians who stay in office for decades lead to dysfunction and rot.

But once it hit Italy bad, there were no more excuses.

I agree with a fair bit of what you are saying here but their behaviour in most cases does not comport with the definition of "lie".

When the President of the United States goes on TV to effectively say: "Danger! Danger! We are Shutting down travel from China". Well, politicians ought to stop, think, call the White House, understand why such a drastic move was made and then fall in line and support the effort rather than fight it.

There is no doubt at all that telling people in NY to continue using the subways, go to festivals, etc. caused the virus to spread exponentially.

NY officials were on TV saying things like "we are ready for this", "we are prepared", "this is just like the flu", "we know how to treat this", etc. None of those things are true. They pulled that stuff out of their collective asses. The Trump administration went five standard deviations in the direction of caution and while the entire Democratic party (in particular NY) and the news media went five standard deviations in the direction of ignorant bullshit.

Look, it's clear that Trump made a mess of his public handling of this event which, rightly so, cost him the election. In public, he was a mess. Being under constant attack from his opponents and having to deal with a rabid media out for blood every second of every day sure didn't help.

Behind the scenes, it's hard to find anything they did wrong. In fact, the actual handling of this pandemic behind the scenes was an outstanding achievement and it should go down in history as such. That team gave us vaccines in eight months. They saved millions of lives around the world.

"Behind the scenes, it's hard to find anything they did wrong."

Off the top of my head: They botched the China travel ban, they delayed and then botched the European travel ban, bad initial CDC tests, poor-to-non-existant data collection, planning based on keeping the virus out instead of mitigation or suppression, bad internal modeling... I think you are being silly.

Let's be clear OWS vaccine development was amazing and good, but OxfordAZ was ready at the same time, China & Russian vaccines too.

While it certainly was xenophobic in Trump’s hands, it was practically a decision that made him happy as a China hater, the motivation of the decision is independent of its utility.

Trump certainly made a mess of it after that.

All of the politicians got fooled by the relative stability and rareness of the pandemic. Most of the time telling people not to panic it won’t be as bad as you fear works OK as a strategy in a country like the US.

That said, on the point about Trump and his relationship with China. I simply don't see it as xenophobic. And, BTW, I have never supported Trump or vote for him. I am a strongly independent classical liberal, with the caveat that I actively seek the truth and will never align myself with any political party by default because that implies they are 100% correct 100% of the time, which is impossible.

And, BTW #2, I don't hate China at all. While I disagree with their social and political stances, on the business front, the job they have done during the last 50 years is nothing less than outstanding. I have experience manufacturing in China and can tell you from that first hand experience that the US almost has no hope of regaining most of the industrial base it lost. While we focus on growing a society with a victim-mentality and growing division they have been growing what might already be the most entrepreneurial society in history. It's hard to describe the difference other than: If you want to get shit done, you go to China, not the US, not Europe. Sorry.

Trump has been talking about China for decades. He has been watching the erosion of our industrial base for a long time. And he rightly points at Chinese practices and the idiocy of our own politicians as some (not all) of the root causes. The popular "corporate greed" cause is nonsense. Go try and manufacture almost anything at scale in the US or Europe and see how far you get. There's no greed involved, we can't even make N95 masks at scale.

The problem with the Trump/China relationship, in my opinion, has many facets.

One of them is that he turned out to be perhaps the worst communicator who has ever inhabited the White House. I mean, his lack of ability to deliver well constructed messages in front of a camera was just unbelievable. In politics and leadership you have to be able to communicate. Every single one of his press briefings and speeches was an absolute train wreck.

The second issue had to do with the all-out warfare the entire Left and the media engaged in for four years. You can't run a country when at least half of your government is engaged in a war against the other half. It's impossible. I don't care who you are.

A simple example of this is Trump's attempt to rescind the postal treaty, dating back to 1874 (yes!) that made it so the US taxpayers subsidize nearly every Chinese package travelling within the US. In other words, once certain class of packages lands on US soil delivery of Chinese goods within the US is FREE. The intention behind this treaty was good. It was meant to help developing nations have access to our markets. Well, it isn't 1874 and China is the second largest economy in the world.

What that treaty means is that, as a US-based business, it costs me more to ship a package to New York than it costs a Chinese competitor. Even if my product cost exactly the same to manufacture, I lose.

That treaty should have been rescinded decades ago. Trump was the only US President (or politician) to speak about this and point out just how badly we were getting screwed and how much damage we are causing our own businesses. And for that his attempt to rescind this ridiculous treaty was labelled as xenophobic and racially motivated. Again, the entire Democratic party and the media were at war with him and could not care less about the absolute fact that this treaty has been damaging our nation for decades. In their ideologically twisted world they could not bring themselves into alignment with him at all, even if that meant damaging every single business in the US.

How do we fix this? Don't know. Other than, perhaps, strong term limits. On the media side, we do not benefit at all from having 95% of the media in political alignment with an ideological side. Imagine if 95% of our media were aligned with the right. That would be horrible. Well, it isn't any different when the tables are turned. This isn't good for anyone.

They should do well to remember people aren't goldfish and have memories beyond three seconds.