[michaelt]

The pandemic showed us making and using a silver bullet in record time - when a silver bullet is possible.

But the pandemic also showed us a large % of the American population are reluctant to make even minor, temporary sacrifices to protect their country. And that a decent fraction of American political leadership are happy to close their eyes to factual reality.

[emerged]

Protecting your country is a considerably more complex and nuanced goal than “save as many lives as possible no matter what” especially since secondary effects of lockdown also cause deaths.

Long term economic effects for example, and the ability to remain globally competitive economically and in other ways.

[michaelt]

The people who opposed lockdowns but were first in line for the vaccine, sure. Maybe they're just in a hurry to get the economy up and running again.

But there are people declining a free a pinprick jab that's been given to billions of other people already, when there's clear evidence it's good for both the nation's interest and their own? The country's not asking us to charge Nazi machine gun nests on the beaches of Normandy here.

[sitkack]

Pharma CEOs got billions richer as folks in the developing world die. The pandemic is far from over while variants mutate against vaccinated people.

The first world response against the vaccine is selfish and short sighted in the same ways that make solving global warming incredibly difficult socially.

The vaccine recipes should be free, the raw materials should be coordinated so that vaccine production is maximized. Just like global warming, no one is safe until everyone is, we are from it yet have the capability to do so. Yet we do not, we finagle to ensure profit over life.

Our collective COVID response is exactly why the climate crisis is so hard.

Our problems are not technological.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/21/business/covid-vaccine-billio...

[thrashh]

Americans acted the way they did because of bad leadership. A lot of people high up sowed the idea that getting a vaccine is not worthwhile and that masking up was an immediate threat to our freedom, and naturally a lot of people heard that and ran with it.

Those Americans aren’t any different from you and me: they just got their news from different sources — sources that shouldn’t be saying what they said.