Another Donald Trump, a rational person inhabiting his body, might have realized he would never win the fight about who said what to whom, but he could win the fight that mattered. He was right that, ultimately, America would not win the war against COVID-19 with lockdowns and face masks. Even the strictest of the strict — governors, that is — opened up too early, unable to resist the economic pressure. And we spiked, and dropped, and started spiking again.
Americans have a streak of freedom that is our great strength and sometimes a terrible weakness. We don’t like being told by government what we can and can’t do. Trump did not invent that. It isn’t just conservatives who feel that way. The American Civil Liberties Union does as well. It would not have been easy for anybody. But he gave credence to the crazies, played politics with the truth and left indelible images of nurses washing their masks and refrigerator trucks outside morgues. We were horribly unprepared. It took too long for people to understand what we were up against, and by then, we were so far behind.
In all but one thing.
Trump had disdain for science from dealing with his own advisers. He bet the lives of hundreds of millions, not hundreds of thousands, on the possibility of doing something that had never been done before and faster than had ever been done before. He bet on science more than any president since John F. Kennedy decided we would land on the moon. In many ways, that was easier.
Trump asked the world’s greatest scientists, the world’s biggest pharma companies, the world’s top universities to do the impossible — to develop this vaccine by the end of the year — and he attached not the usual millions but billions. The system encouraged collaboration. Hundreds of millions of doses of as-yet-developed, much less manufactured, vaccines were purchased. Many countries in the European Union bet primarily on one vaccine, from AstraZeneca. Multiple countries had suspended it after reports of people developing (rare and potentially unrelated) blood clots after being inoculated, though it was declared safe again. The United States, having bought vaccines from everybody, is apparently giving away 100 million or so doses of AstraZeneca that it has ordered but won’t be using to some deserving country or another.
