This will be a bit of a rant. But now that we've had two years to put it in perspective, I'm more convinced than ever that Donald Trump's actions caused more than half a million unnecessary American deaths.
Picture where we were two years ago today. The US and South Korea had both found their first case just over 6 weeks previous, literally on the same day zero. On day 1, South Korea's president met with the heads of the four biggest pharma outfits, and gave them the green light to start mass producing tests based on the WHO design from the genome China had shared in early January.
By this date, South Korea had used many thousands of tests along with massive contact tracing to start containing what would be one of the biggest super-spreader events in the world. The US, meanwhile, had almost no tests, because only the CDC was allowed to do it, they rejected the WHO design, and then botched production. We were flying blind. (South Korea was finding 500 cases/day in their much smaller population; the US was around 50...but would rapidly climb to 30k+ as tests became available.)
By March 6, it was looking like there was a major outbreak in Italy, and hard lockdowns would be following over the next two to three days. New York was in similar shape, but nobody had any idea because we had no tests.
But that could have been a blip that we'd recover from. But unlike almost every other nation, our leader chose not to fight COVID or try to control it. In his mind, fear of COVID could affect the stock market, which was unacceptable in an election year. So from the beginning, he denied or downplayed all evidence of the seriousness of the threat, and painted anyone who was concerned as a political enemy trying to make him look bad. Fox News and the rest of the right wing media took the cue and ran with it. China Virus. Just the flu. Sheeple. This irrevocably set us down two incompatible paths, with nearly half the country viewing COVID as a hoax and any attempts to limit the spread as political posturing to hurt the president.
It would continue long past Trump's time in office. The vaccines, accelerated to some extent by Trump's Operation Warp Speed, could have been a feather in his cap, a badge of pride. But instead of embracing them, the right catered to all flavors of antivax sentiment, leaving the US with vaccination rates in seniors lower than nearly anywhere else in the western world. And because the vaccines gave 95%+ protection against severe disease and death, even vs. delta and omicron, most of our 2021 and 2022 deaths would have been prevented.
Almost all of that was set in motion in February and March of 2020. A denial that we had a problem...when case numbers were doubling every 3 days. A prediction that it would just go away. A blatantly false claim that anybody who wants a test is able to get one. (And claiming that the tests were almost as perfect as his call when he threatened to withhold military aid from Ukraine unless they produce political dirt against his opponent.) A poster-perfect illustration of Dunning-Kruger. And his refusal to let passengers off a cruise ship because it would make his case numbers look bad.
This seven week period set the tone of our pandemic response, and it committed us to a path with at least 500k more deaths than necessary.