"Experts" that clearly did no analysis of underlying causes.

"Overreliance on vaccines" - they never were going to be enough. Vaccines were the "return to normalcy" panacea for propaganda purposes so you'd get forced back to work.

"Failure to develop contingency plans" doesn't mean anything. The same thing has been happening over and over again. There's no planning required, just action that contradicts short-term business and finance interests.

"Fracturing of expert consensus" as if we don't already know what interventions work and yet refuse to do them. The WHO specifically stated, at the beginning of the pandemic, that the worst possible strategy was to do cycles of locking down late and then opening optimistically. This is exactly what the US decided to do, lol. What we had was as high-profile bullshit artists shilling a corporate line.

But really, any analysis that doesn't analyze power dynamics will fail to answer the question of why the US sacrificed its people and Vietnam did not.

yep

"what do you mean you can't just pay private corporations to solve problems and then just sit back it's always worked for everything else?"

this is good too:

"Over the summer, Abbott Laboratories — the largest manufacturer of at-home rapid tests in the US — actually started destroying some of its test inventory because it did not anticipate a market for those tests and the government had not bought the excess supply. This meant that when omicron start to spread, there was not a stockpile of masks or tests to distribute to people quickly."