Or it could be because US has 4% of the world population but 25% of the coronavirus cases? With supposedly the best brain trust and the biggest economy of the world, we were maybe expected to do better but landed up performing worse than other developed nations that have at least used this time to establish the infrastructure to conduct limited local openings or closings as needed? Maybe we really blew handling covid because of excessive political interference and amplification of fringe conspiracy theories?

Yeah, that's one of the other standard lines being pushed by the press to convince everyone that the US is uniquely failing. It's a very effective talking point. The trouble is, it makes no sense to compare those two numbers because most of the world's population is in places that don't have widespread access to medical care or coronavirus testing, and we know that there have been major outbreaks in pretty much all of those areas. (For instance, antibody testing on a sample of residents suggests about half the population of Mumbai's main slums had caught Covid-19 as of a couple of months or so ago. That's quite a lot of people which really weren't captured by the official case count - and there have also been outbreaks throughout India, including more recently in rural areas, in Africa, South America, Mexico...)

The other problem is that even within Europe, the really major outbreaks happened in countries which also didn't have widespread coronavirus testing at the time. For the most part they were usually only testing people who ended up being hospitalized. So the total death counts are probably reasonably accurate, but case counts are basically meaningless even for those outbreaks. (Which causes some problems when comparing the current, somewhat alarming case counts in many European countries with the initial wave.)

I'm not going to defend US policy in terms of COVID handling, but comparing positive test numbers in the US to positive test numbers in the rest of the world mostly tells you about testing rates.

The US has 22% of the total (verified) global COVID-19 deaths. Most deaths occur in those aged 65 or above. 9% of the global population (702M people) is over 65. 17% of the US population (56M people) is over 65.

So the US has 8% of the population over 65 but 22% of the COVID deaths - it's still almost a factor of 3, so definitely not just reporting artifacts, but it's not a factor of 6+ either in terms of how the US is doing vs how you would expect.

That could be true. But it doesn't answer why there is such a force of propaganda surrounding Covid. If what you said is true, it should be plainly reported and clearly understood (fringe conspiracy theories aside). Instead, we've got this blizzard of people trying to make it very hard to see anything objectively. Why? (Which, restated, is nickthemagicman's question.)