The Atlantic’s Ed Yong on Why the U.S. Bungled the Pandemic

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: I would say that there was a false narrative that you correctly point out in this piece that many pointed to the reason the U.S. bombed so early in this pandemic, and, in large part, it was because of the government and the administration and the lack of preparation and action by President Trump. But you acknowledge that that wasn’t it alone, that no matter who had been president, we would still be facing a catastrophe. Why was that important for you to break down?

ED YONG, “THE ATLANTIC”: Because I think Trump mishandled the pandemic so egregiously that it’s very easy to say that, if we hadn’t had a commander in chief who was touting false miracle cures or just outrightly downplaying the threat altogether, that we would have done OK. I don’t think that’s the case. And I think our performance with — against the Delta — the Delta variant shows that not to be the case, America is riddled with deep-rooted vulnerabilities that make it exquisitely susceptible to a new pathogen. It’s not just to do with who’s in charge. It is also to do with its incredibly weak public health system, which has been allowed to rot for over a century. It has to do with its extreme inequality, such that millions of people cannot access health care at all, and that many, many more have been the subject of longstanding racist and classist policies that have left them vulnerable to not only COVID, but to a variety of other health conditions. All of these weaknesses, as one public health expert told me, are in the rootstock. They’re not high up in the trees. And as we have seen, even with a president who is taking the pandemic seriously, those problems are incredibly costly. And the U.S. cannot expect to just do what it normally tries to do, which is to use biomedical solutions, vaccines, therapeutics and the like, to plaster its way out of those problems. Those problems need to be solved.