Plagues & State Capacity: There were four major errors in the American governance response to COVID: (1) The CDC’s decision to start lying to people—to say that masks did not work rather than that we wanted to reserve high-quality masks for doctors and nurses at the point of the sphere—(2) Trump’s extraordinary incompetence along so many dimensions, (3) the decision not t ramp up candidate vaccine production immediately upon vaccine design but rather to wait nine months for the Phase 3 trial process, & (4) the decision not to have the U.S. pay to vaccinate the world as fast as possible. Pretty much everything else is underflow, or is downstream from those clusterfuck decisions. But MattY has very good points about how the current retrospective politics-of-blame is highly contingent on Donald Trump’s being an idiot compared to Scott Morrison:

Matt Yglesias: 17 thoughts four years after Covid: ‘We've made frustratingly little progress in figuring out how to do better…. The intense partisan and ideological polarization around Covid that became such a dominant aspect of the experience was, I think, pretty contingent. Trump put travel restrictions in place on March 12 <washingtonpost.com/worl…, which was a week ahead of Australia closing its borders <timeout.com/sydney/news…. Australia quickly followed that with restrictions on internal travel <health.nsw.gov.au/news/…, which Ron Desantis asked for on March 14 <politico.com/states/new……. [In] Australia, Scott Morrison was a right-wing populist whose public profile pre-Covid was dominated by anti-immigration stuff…. If the Australian right could implement hard lockdowns to control the virus, I believe the American right could have as well. This probably would have saved a ton of lives. Australia and other countries with tougher lockdown policies saw dramatically lower mortality. Had Trump become a hard lockdown guy, I think it’s plausible that huge swathes of the discourse would be different. The USA would have joined right-wing Australia and other very order-oriented Asian countries and had much lower death rates than we saw in Europe, progressives’ favorite continent…. As liberals flailed, a distressingly large share of conservative commentary on Covid centered on just making things up. Instead of making all these good points that I am making about Covid NPIs, they would say the disease was no worse than the flu. Or that it would magically evaporate by April. Or that the Covid deaths were a result of classification error. None of that is true, and its widespread circulation contributed to the much lower vaccine uptake among conservatives, and ultimately, the much higher death toll of the disease among conservative Americans…. It’s a really bad idea to map crisis-management onto… [preëxisting] ideological grooves… <