[roenxi]

You forgot a step - the elites will ban any community attempts to self-organise and solve their own problems. Note that in the COVID pandemic it is typically illegal (at least in the West) for non-government actors to decide what controls and remedies are appropriate.

[rbanffy]

I’m pretty sure governments only set minimum controls and remedies and communities are free to implement additional measures on top of that.

[roenxi]

I seem to recall someone, possibly the US CDC, banning alternative COVID tests to their faulty one in the early days of the pandemic.

If someone attempts set up emergency mask production they'd probably get hit by anti-gouging laws, because that isn't cheap.

And the vaccines are presumably only available because the governments relented, fast-tracked them and provided special guarantees to help people get over the testing hurdle. Normally it takes 4-8 years to get a vaccine to market. We've got evidence here that those years are more red tape than requirement, it suggests up to 75% of the regulatory process is destructive theatre.

[rbanffy]

Clinical testing is affected by diminishing returns. Anything is a lot safer after a month of testing, but the usual safety standards demands a little more safety, and improving on “100 times less likely to kill you than the disease” thing often takes years.

This will not be our last pandemic. The lessons we leaned, and the lessons we should have learned, will come back a lot.