You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life. You don’t just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally. We could have these things but we chose not to - specifically we chose not to have the mechanisms, the factories, the systems to make these things. At least therapies and vaccines are hard! Making masks and transferring money are not hard.
Why do we not have these things? Medical equipment and financial conduits involve no rocket science whatsoever. A government that collects money from all its citizens and businesses each year has never built a system to distribute money to us when it’s needed most.
Tens of millions of laid off workers and their families, and many millions of small businesses, are in serious trouble *right now*, and we have no direct method to transfer them money without potentially disastrous delays. In the U.S., we don’t even have the ability to get federal bailout money to the people and businesses that need it. And even then, we’ll see if we can deploy therapies or a vaccine fast enough to matter - it took scientists 5 years to get regulatory testing approval for the new Ebola vaccine after that scourge’s 2014 outbreak, at the cost of many lives. Our scientists will hopefully invent therapies and a vaccine, but then we may not have the manufacturing factories required to scale their production. We also don’t have therapies or a vaccine - despite, again, years of advance warning about bat-borne coronaviruses. And we don’t have enough surgical masks, eye shields, and medical gowns - as I write this, New York City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical gowns. We don’t have enough ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds. We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials - including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents. We see this today with the things we urgently need but don’t have.