As a european, I don't understand why the european response is seen as significantly better on this front than the US', especially in the context of Andreeson's criticism.

I mean, Europe has had some of the worst outbreaks, mortality rates, failures of the hospital system, elderly care... The horror of peak covid in northern Italy was, largely, a preventable failure.

We also see a similar helplessness when it came to actions that required "building." Ability or inability to do "lockdown" well varied, but that's not building.

The one obvious thing that did need "build" was testing, contact tracing and such. Very few countries managed to scale up testing fast, even by now.